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General Editor
JOSEPH BOOT EICC Founder
JOSEPH BOOT
2 Editorial Ryan Eras 5
“The Sweetest Spectacle”: The Cross and God’s Justifying Love According to Martin Luther Rev. Dr. David Robinson
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Solus Christus: Redemption and The Trouble With Being “Cross-Centered” Dr. P. Andrew Sandlin
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Law and Cultural Reformation: Augustine, Calvin And The Puritans on God’s Law and Society Rev. Dr. Joe Boot
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“Reverence and Adoration Of The Fullness Of The Scriptures”: Remembering The Ministry Of William Bridge Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin
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Resource Corner Jubilee is provided without cost to all those who request it.
Jubilee is the tri-annual publication of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity (EICC), a registered charitable Christian organization. The opinions expressed in Jubilee do not necessarily reflect the views of the EICC. Jubilee provides a forum for views in accord with a relevant, active, historic Christianity, though those views may on occasion differ somewhat from the EICC’s and from each other. The EICC depends on the contribution of its readers, and all gifts over $10 will be tax receipted. Permission to reprint granted on written request only. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement Number: PM42112023 Return all mail undeliverable to: EICC, 9 Hewitt Ave., Toronto, ON M6R 1Y4, www.ezrainstitute.ca
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
To receive Jubilee please visit, www.ezrainstitute.ca/jubilee Or write to us: EICC, 9 Hewitt Ave., Toronto, ON M6R 1Y4. jubilee@ezrainstitute.ca
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JUBILEE EDITORIAL: ISSUE 20
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RYAN ERAS RYAN ERAS is Director of Content and Publishing at the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto, where he focused on bibliographic control and the history of censorship. Ryan has served in various educational and support roles, providing bibliographic research and critical editorial review for several academic publications. He lives in Toronto with his wife Rachel and their three children, Isabelle, Joanna and Simon.
FOR MONTHS NOW, PROTESTANTS
around the world have been observing, celebrating and reflecting on five hundred years of the Reformation, in the lead up to the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the chapel door of Wittenberg Castle on October 31, 1517. It is simplistic, of course, to speak of “the Reformation” as though it were a singular event; this period of history has been more accurately referred to as “the Age of Reformation.” Readers of church history will be aware of the interrelation of the many personalities, movements, controversies and practical realities during this era, not to mention the influence of geopolitical and ecclesio-political interests, as well as the technological advances in printing that greatly increased the speed with which ideas could be circulated. All of these contributed to the shape and extent of the reformation movement throughout Europe. Historian Steven Ozment, in his awardwinning book, The Age of Reform, introduces this era as follows: The religious beliefs and practices that reshaped sixteenth-century towns and territories were the work of generations of intellectuals and reformers, trained theologians and educated laymen, who drew on ancient traditions and competed for the loyalty of a laity acutely sensitive to the societal consequences of religious issues.1
Nevertheless, it is appropriate to understand Luther’s activity that October day as the flashpoint for what would come to be known as the Protestant Reformation. When Luther posted his 95 Theses, titled A Disputation on the Power of Indulgences, he may not have expected them to attract much attention outside of the theological faculty at the University of Wittenberg.2 In fact, just a month earlier, Luther had posted a set of 97 Theses to just such polite academic interest. Titled A Disputation against Scholastic Theology, those 97 Theses had as their main target the philosophy of Aristotle and the late-medieval theologians who adopted the Aristotelean worldview. W. Robert Godfrey FALL 2017
contends that these lesser-known Theses “are much more interesting and important from a theological point of view than the 95 Theses;”3 however this theological point of view had little bearing on political or ecclesiastical authority or the broader social context, and so remained a largely academic matter. In his 95 theses against indulgences, Purgatory, and salvation by works, however, Luther was directly confronting papal authority, and on the very tangible issue of money.4 It was not long before the controversy reached beyond the academy and into the realm of real-world consequences. From Luther’s perspective, the dispute over indulgences was at root a struggle to acknowledge the sufficiency and supremacy of the Word of God. His preface to the 95 Theses declares that they were written “out of love for the truth and from desire to bring it to light...”5 While it is again simplistic to try to reduce the causes and aims of the Reformation to a single issue, this theme of authority – the question of the normative standard for Christian belief and practice – is dominant among Luther and the other reformers. They emphasized the infallibility and sole authority of God’s Word, the doctrine we have come to know as Sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura was one of five “Solas” of the reform movement summarizing the Reformational worldview, each of which, in its own sphere, and mutually reinforcing one another, emphasized that because of the atoning death and powerful resurrection of Jesus Christ, no other mediator was necessary, or indeed, possible, between God and man.6 In championing “Scripture alone,” the reformers meant that the Bible is the sole infallible rule of faith for the church. Sola Scriptura does not deny the legitimacy, value, or even authority of extra-biblical traditions, rules, creeds, confessions or other knowledge, but teaches that such things are inferior to, and subject to correction by, the Scriptures. That is to say, the content of such traditions ought to be accepted only in so far as it agrees with the content of Scripture. James White explains, “The Bible is an ultimate authority, allowing no equal, nor superior, in tradition or church. It is so because it is theopneustos, Godbreathed, and hence embodies the very speaking Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Editorial: Issue 20
of God, and must, of necessity therefore be of the highest authority.”7 Sola Scriptura was not a novel doctrine cobbled together by the reformers. Indeed, the Reformation was in large part a reaction against such novelties and deviations as indulgences and the belief in works-based righteousness that had been introduced in the Roman Church. The bulk of Luther’s theses are proposals for a return to Christian belief and practice as taught in Scripture. This doctrine of the authority of Scripture is found first in Scripture itself. Jesus and the apostles consistently presupposed the veracity and authority of the Old Testament (see Matt. 19:4; Mark 12:24-26; 2 Tim. 3:16; Jas. 2:23), and Peter sets the writings of Paul as the inspired equal to the Old Testament, saying of his letters that “the ignorant and unstable twist [them] to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16). The early church fathers similarly assumed and upheld the ultimate authority of Scripture, writing variously that “with regard to the divine and saving mysteries of faith no doctrine, however trivial, may be taught without the backing of the divine Scriptures…. For our saving faith derives its force, not from capricious reasonings, but from what may be proved out of the Bible,”8 and, “in the plain teaching of Scripture we find all that concerns our belief and moral conduct.”9 So pervasive was this point among these early theologians that J.N.D. Kelly writes, “there is little need to dwell on the absolute authority accorded to Scripture as a doctrinal norm.”10 On this and other points, then, it is appropriate to understand the Reformation not as a novelty, but as a rejection of extra-biblical novelty. Along similar lines, another slogan that characterized the Reformation Age was ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda – “the church reformed, always reforming.” John Frame explains that this phrase, in harmony with Sola Scriptura, furnishes a principle for dynamic, creative, and faithful living before God: “both ‘reformed’ and ‘reforming.’ Our faith is ‘reformed,’ based on unchanging biblical principle. But our faith is also ‘reforming,’ challenging all human traditions and fashions by the word of God.”11 Just as the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
initial Reformation was a developing movement that strove to be faithful to the constant touchpoint of Scripture, so in our own time we should be mindful of the constant need to submit our doctrines, beliefs, and experiences to the inspired, authoritative Word of God, and to interpret all of life and history in light of that Word. IN THIS ISSUE
By historical example, theological reflection, and thorough biblical exegesis, the articles in this issue of Jubilee seek to embody that same love for God and his eternal, infallible Word. Among other things, they demonstrate that Sola Scriptura is a principle connected to an all-encompassing worldview that recognizes the purity and power of the gospel to redeem and reform all of life to the glory of God. David Robinson examines Luther’s teaching on justification, another key doctrine of the Reformation. Through earnest study and prayer, Luther came to understand the beauty of the justice and righteousness of God. Truly it is a justice that convicts sinners, throwing our sinfulness into sharp relief. But when the believer is united with Christ, he takes our sin and does not just pardon it, but destroys it in his death and resurrection, making us truly righteous and ready to do the good works of righteousness. Andrew Sandlin considers the nature of redemption and the centrality of Jesus Christ to Christian history, doctrine, community and experience. Where some Christians and churches risk overemphasizing the crucifixion of Christ our Passover Lamb, the Christian story moves on from there to the glorious resurrection, ascension and session of Jesus the King, to whom has been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Joe Boot surveys attitudes toward the law of God in Augustine, Calvin, and the Puritans – the intellectual heirs of the reformers – and reminds us that reformation is an attitude of the heart, that the reformed heart is one that seeks to obey God in all things, and not to weaken or remove his commands.
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Editorial: Issue 20
Michael Haykin discusses the life of the Puritan preacher William Bridge, who served as chaplain to the Parliamentary Army, and who set an example in calling his hearers back to the unchanging Word of God as the norm for all of doctrine and practice.
1 Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 12501550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), xii. 2 The selling of indulgences was emphasized by Pope Leo X in 1515 as a means of financing the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. 3 W. Robert Godfrey, Reformation Sketches: Insights into Luther, Calvin, and the Confessions (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2003), 35. 4 At least twenty of the ninety-five Theses are explicitly about the ways that indulgences are a sinful invention that harms God’s people and undermines His grace. 5 Martin Luther, “Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther, on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” in Works of Martin Luther: Adolph Spaeth, L.D. Reed, Henry Eyster Jacobs, et Al., Trans. & Eds. (Philadelphia: A. J. Holman Company, 1915), Vol.1, p. 29-38. 6 The others are Sola Fide (“faith alone”): We are saved through faith alone in Jesus Christ; Sola Gratia (“grace alone”): We are saved by the grace of God alone; Solus Christus (“Christ alone”): Jesus Christ alone is our Lord, Savior,
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and King; Soli Deo Gloria (“to the glory of God alone”): We live for the glory of God alone. Douglas Wilson observes that “Rightly understood, these things taken together constitute a worldview. And when the world is enveloped this way, there are no pieces left over.” See Douglas Wilson, “Reformation Now,” Blog & Mablog, last modified October 29, 2016, https://dougwils.com/s8-expository/reformation-now.html. James White, “Sola Scriptura in Dialogue,” Alpha and Omega Ministries, last modified 2006, http://vintage.aomin.org/SS.html. Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. 4, 17, translated by Edwin Hamilton Gifford. From Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 7. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3101.htm. Augustine, de doct. Christ. 2, 14, translated by James Shaw. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/1202.htm. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 2003), 42. John Frame, “A Theology of Opportunity: Sola Scriptura and the Great Commission,” FramePoythress, last modified May 15, 2012, https:// frame-poythress.org/a-theology-of-opportunity-sola-scriptura-and-the-great-commission/.
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
“The Sweetest
SPECTACLE”:
THE CROSS
and
GOD’S JUSTIFYING LOVE
According to Martin Luther IN THE PREFACE TO his Latin works,
published a year before his death, Martin Luther looked back on the early years of his fight for evangelical reform in the church.1 His struggle against the sins of the church began with an internal conflict between his own sin and God’s righteousness. As Luther tells it, he was plagued by the phrase: “the justice of God,” or “the righteousness of God.” The Apostle Paul had written that the Gospel was the revelation of God’s righteousness (Rom. 1:17). If the Gospel reveals God’s righteousness, it also reveals our own unrighteousness. To Luther’s ears, this made the Gospel a word of condemnation, and so he confesses: “I hated that word, ‘the justice of God’.”2 Christ was sometimes depicted in late medieval art as the judge, seated on a rainbow with a sword coming from his mouth. This apocalyptic image of Christ haunted Luther. The divine sword of judgment hung over his life. He stood condemned by God’s righteousness and cast out from God’s presence. He was derelict and lost. Then everything changed. Luther was lecturing on Romans, Galatians, and the Psalms at the University of Wittenberg. As he wrestled with the phrase, “the righteousness of God” in Romans, he was also teaching the Psalms. For over a millennium the Psalms had been read and taught Christologically. Many of the Psalms were understood to be prayers and songs about Christ, or prayers and songs of Christ. Psalm 22 is a prayer of Christ, who cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1)3 Christ had uttered Luther’s own cry of dereliction, and Luther heard it. As Roland Bainton has so memorably put it, “The judge on the rainbow had become the derelict on cross.”4 Luther began to see his own life, as well as the church and the world, in the light of the cross. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Before he could understand what the Apostle Paul meant by “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1, he learned what Paul meant in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” A living faith in the living Son of God, who loved him and gave himself for him, was the key that unlocked the meaning of Romans 1:17: “for in [the Gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed.” Luther recounts this breakthrough in the preface to his Latin works: Day and night I tried to meditate on the significance of these words: “the righteousness of God is revealed in it as it is written: ‘The righteous shall live by faith’.” (Romans 1:17) Then, finally, God had mercy on me and I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that gift of God by which a righteous man lives, namely faith, and that this sentence is passive, indicating that the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” Now I felt as though I had been reborn altogether [ich ganz wiedergeboren sei] and had entered Paradise.5 Thus, Luther came to know what it meant to be justified by faith. Justification by faith is a hallmark of Reformation doctrine. As we mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, it’s worth reviewing Luther’s teaching on justification. Besides Luther’s own voluminous writings, there’s a mountain of secondary literature on his doctrine of justification and its implications for the Christian, the church, and society. I’d be crazy to think I could provide a comprehensive account in just a few pages. My purpose here is to identify the main lines of Luther’s teaching on Christ, the cross, and justification in some of his early writings.6 For
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REV. DR. DAVID ROBINSON
REV. DR. DAVID ROBINSON is Fellow for Patristics and Pastoral Theology with the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity, and Senior Pastor at Westminster Chapel, Toronto. David has a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of St. Michael’s College (at the University of Toronto), where he studied the history and theology of Early Christianity. His doctoral dissertation translated and analyzed an early Christian commentary on the book of Revelation. He has presented papers at various academic conferences and has published articles in Studia Patristica, Worship, Theoforum, Humanitas, and Revista Vida y Espiritualidad. David also serves as the Ontario/Quebec regional president of Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) and as senior fellow for the Centre for Ancient Christian Studies. David teaches courses in historical theology and biblical studies at Tyndale University College. He lives in Toronto with his wife Megan and three children, Samuel, Leah and Lucas.
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The Sweetest Spectacle
Luther, the doctrine of justification by faith was not an abstract point of theology which needed a bit of scholastic retweaking, nor did he argue for a strictly forensic7 view of justification. As he saw it, justification needed to be understood within the context of Christology and centred upon the incarnate, crucified, and risen Son of God. He felt as though he “had been reborn altogether and entered Paradise” when he recognized the Son of God in his place on the cross. The cross revealed God and it revealed himself, showing him to be an even worse sinner than “Justification by he imagined. A sinner, yes, but a sinfaith is not simply a ner whom God loved with a justifying forensic pardoning love. Luther discovered in those early of sin through the years that faith alone receives such love. imputation of Christ’s For Luther, justification by faith is not righteousness, but the simply a forensic pardoning of sin dramatic rescue and through the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, but the dramatic rescue resurrection of dead and resurrection of dead and lost sinand lost sinners.” ners, whose justification liberates them for loving service. DOING YOUR BEST
Luther was both a parish priest and a doctor of theology. He heard confession, preached, and administered the sacraments in church and he studied, taught, and debated theology in the university. As a theologian, he was conversant with the wider scholastic tradition of theological studies and the particular expression of that tradition in the so-called via moderna of his contemporaries. I’d rather not get into the ins and outs of the via moderna, because once you get in it’s hard to find your way out.8 For the purpose of this article, it’s enough to know that Luther pinpointed serious faults in this tradition of late medieval theology, which undermined the Gospel itself. Luther was troubled by the optimistic anthropology of contemporary theologians. One phrase was particularly offensive: “to those who do what is in them, God will not deny grace.”9 Yes, we all need the help of God’s grace, but God’s grace is more effective in those who do their best – “to do what is in oneself ” (facere quod in se est). The theologians of Luther’s day were careful to present their teaching with lots of scholastic qualifiFALL 2017
cations and support from Scripture and church tradition; however, Luther recognized that it boiled down to something like ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ Strip away the scholastic support structure and you’re left with a doctrine that Joel Osteen would gladly retweet: “Do what is in you!” THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET
“Do what is in you!” Luther asked one question: “What then is in us?”10 This was a question Luther posed at the Heidelberg Disputation in April, 1518. By this time his 95 theses from the previous October had been reprinted and circulated, and he had become well-known and controversial. His superiors in the Augustinian order wanted an explanation of what had been dubbed “the Wittenberg theology.” Luther was summoned to an assembly of the German Augustinians in Heidelberg to give an account.11 Martin Bucer, who went on to be a leading reformer in Strasbourg, was there and gave this report: “Luther’s sweetness in answering is remarkable; his patience in listening is incomparable; in his explanations you would recognize the acumen of Paul, not of Scotus; his answers, so brief, so wise, and drawn from scripture easily turned all his hearers into admirers.”12 What did Luther say that left such an impression on Bucer? Luther submitted and defended twenty-eight theological theses and twelve philosophical theses at the disputation in Heidelberg.13 The twentyeight theological theses present a devastating critique of late medieval theology and a concise yet profound statement on sin, righteousness, the cross of Christ, the task of theology, and God’s love. Theses 1-18 address the question, “what then is in us?” If God does not deny grace to those who do what is in them, presumably there’s some good in them that attracts grace. According to Luther’s contemporary theologians, divine grace is operative in our salvation (nobody at the time was suggesting we’re saved by our good works); however, grace finds and works with our good works. God’s grace elevates, adorns, and perfects what is good in us. In Theses 1-18, Luther launches a devastating Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The Sweetest Spectacle
attack on our good works. Scripture says we are dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1), so that even our righteous deeds are like filthy rags (Isa. 64:6). A dead person produces dead works, just as a bad tree produces bad fruit. Even our good works, Luther argues, are deadly sins.14 They don’t merit God’s grace. Our good works deceive us, because they give us a false sense of security by suggesting there is some good in us. Luther drops the gauntlet in Thesis 16: “The person who believes that one can obtain grace ‘by doing what is in oneself ’ adds sin to sin and thus becomes doubly guilty.”15 He cites Jeremiah 2:13 in his proof for this thesis, “for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”16 Luther applied this prophetic indictment to the theologians of his day. Those who seek to obtain grace by “doing what is in them” are trying to draw water from their own cisterns, which are broken and hold no water. Luther argued for a biblical anthropology: we are broken cisterns, bad trees, dead in our trespasses in sins. If salvation in any way depends “doing what is in you,” there is no hope of salvation. Divine grace does not work salvation by working with our good works, for there is nothing good in us with which to work. A broken cistern holds no water. A bad tree does not bear good fruit. A dead man cannot do works that lead to life. Again, this is why Luther is so adamant in his denunciation of any appeal to good works, because seemingly good works give us a false sense of confidence before God. Thesis 16 and its proof present a bleak picture of human depravity, but Thesis 17 sounds a hopeful and pastoral note, because it points us to Christ: “Nor does speaking in this manner give cause for despair, but rather for humility, for it arouses the desire to seek the grace of Christ.”17 Recognizing the true state of our fallen condition makes us humble (humiliandi). For Luther, humility and faith are inseparable, because the humbled man no longer trusts in himself but in Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
AN EARNEST MIRROR
In 1519, a year after the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther preached a sermon on the meditation of Christ’s passion.18 While Luther always maintained that God’s law reveals the total depravity of our sinful condition, “since through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20), it’s the light of the cross that exposes just how damnably depraved we are. Luther refers to the crucifixion of Christ as an “earnest mirror” (enster Spiegel).19 Those who contemplate the passion of Christ should “recognize their own true selves and be terrified and crushed by what they see.”20 The crucifixion should give you a terrified heart and a despairing conscience. This terror must be felt as you witness the stern wrath and the unchanging seriousness with which God looks upon sin and sinners.… And if you take seriously that it is God’s very own Son, the eternal wisdom of the Father, who suffers, you will be truly terrified, and the more you consider this the deeper the terror. You must impress this deeply in your mind and not doubt you are the one who makes Christ suffer in this way, for your sins have certainly caused this.21
Likewise, preaching the cross should awaken the conscience and cut to the heart and, as Luther put it, “execute the old Adam.”22 Luther counsels us to pray that God would soften and cut our hearts, that Christ may be buried there. We too must learn what the Apostle Paul meant when “For Luther, he said, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who humility and faith lives in me” (Gal. 2:20a). are inseparable, Luther is not promoting morose introspection, leading to self-pity and despair. Yes, the cross is an earnest mirror, revealing the gravity of our sin, which weighed down on the incarnate Son of God to point of asphyxiation; however, Luther counsels that when the weight of our sins bear down on our own consciences, our sins “must be shaken back on [Christ] and the conscience emptied of them.”23 Don’t dwell on your sin and let it linger in your conscience, for as long as it lingers,
because the humbled man no longer trusts in himself but in Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us.”
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The Sweetest Spectacle
it lives. Christ killed your sin on the cross and it was buried with him. Luther exhorts: if we see that [our sin] rests on Christ and is overcome by his resurrection, and then boldly believe this, then sin is dead and nullified. For sin cannot remain on Christ, since it is swallowed up by his resurrection…. As St. Paul declares [Rom. 4:25], “Christ was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification,” that is in his suffering Christ reveals our sin and thereby executes it, but through his resurrection Christ makes us righteous and free of all sin, when we believe this.24
For Luther, meditating upon the crucifixion of Christ must lead us to the resurrection and victory of Christ. Preaching Christ “Don’t dwell on your crucified means preaching the risen sin and let it linger in and ascended Christ, for he was raised your conscience, for for our justification. Justifying faith as long as it lingers, is vivifying faith and vivifying faith it lives. Christ killed abides in the love of God.
your sin on the cross and it was buried with him.”
The cross not only reveals who I am, but who God is. As you contemplate the suffering Son of God,
pass through [the suffering] and see Christ’s friendly heart and how full of love it is toward you that it impels him to carry with heaviness your conscience and your sin. Then your heart will be sweet toward him, and the confidence of faith will be strengthened. Now go further and rise through Christ’s heart to God’s heart, and you will see that Christ would not have shown his love for you if God, to whom Christ with his love for you is obedient, did not want to hold [you] in eternal love. There you will find the divine, good, fatherly heart.25
When I look into the earnest mirror of the cross, I see a wretched sinner, but Luther says, “keep looking, you’re a loved sinner.” God’s love not only justifies sinners through penal substitution and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. God’s love justifies sinners by giving them new FALL 2017
life and causing them walk in righteousness. As Luther argued in Thesis 28 of the Heidelberg Disputation: “God’s love does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.”26 He elaborates in the proof for Thesis 28: Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows out and bestows good. For this reason, sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive…. This is the love of the cross, born of the cross, which turns in the direction where it does not find good, which it may enjoy, but where it may confer good upon the evil and needy person.27
Justifying faith recognizes and receives God’s love for sinners, which confers good, creates what is pleasing, and makes us attractive. Put another way, justifying faith unites us to Christ, our heavenly Bridegroom, who washes and nourishes and loves and cherishes his bride, “so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:27). THE SWEETEST SPECTACLE
God’s justifying love joins Christ and the church in an inseparable and eternal marital union. The righteousness of God is betrothed through Christ and becomes ours in Christ through faith, which “unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united to her bridegroom.”28 Marriage is a covenant, an exchange of persons, which is why the bride declares in the Song of Songs 2:16: “My beloved in mine and I am his.” Luther views justification from this bridal perspective. We are justified by faith because faith unites us to Christ, our eternal husband, who says to us, “I am yours and you are mine.” Luther calls this union “the most perfect of marriages” and “the sweetest spectacle” (dulcissimum spectaculum),29 in which bride and groom truly share everything in common: Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The Sweetest Spectacle
the soul has Christ claims as his own. Let us compare these and we shall see inestimable benefits. Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?30
The union is eternally glorious. While Christ bears the shame of our sin and condemnation, he does not bear it eternally. He destroys it. Thus, Luther also describes the union as “salvific combat” (salutaris belli)31 in which Christ defeats and destroys our sin and death and condemnation: he shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are his bride’s. As a matter of fact, he makes them his own and acts as if they were his own and as if he himself had sinned; he suffered, died, and descended into hell that he might overcome them all. Now since it was such a one who did all this, and death and hell could not swallow him up, these were necessarily swallowed up by him in a mighty duel; for his righteousness is greater than the sins of all men, his life stronger than death, his salvation more invincible than hell. Thus the believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom, free from all sins, secure against death and hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ its bridegroom… Who then can fully appreciate what this royal marriage means? Who can understand the riches of the glory of this grace? Here this rich and divine bridegroom Christ marries this poor, wicked harlot, redeems her from all her evil, and adorns her with all his goodness. Her sins cannot now destroy her, since they are laid upon Christ and swallowed up by him. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
And she has that righteousness in Christ, her husband, of which she may boast as of her own and which she can confidently display alongside her sins in the face of death and hell and say, “If I have sinned, yet my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned, and all his is mine and all mine is his,” as the bride in the Song of Solomon [2:16] says, “My beloved is mine and I am his.”32
“Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows out and bestows good. For this reason, sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.”
Rather than viewing justification in a strictly forensic sense, in terms of penal substitution and imputed righteousness, Luther also sees it in the light of our marital union with Christ, in which our eternal husband bears and destroys our sin and death and shame, and gives us his righteousness and life and glory. We are justified by faith because by faith we receive Christ as our eternal husband, who says to us, “I am yours and you are mine.” “I AM YOURS”
With this understanding of justification now in hand, we can return to the question of good works. Luther writes, “our faith in Christ does not free us from works but from false opinions concerning works, that is, from the foolish presumption that justification is acquired by works.”33 Fruits do not bear trees; trees bear fruits. Good works do not make us righteous; righteousness brings forth good works. Outside of Christ, we are bad trees and bear bad fruit. Having been made righteous by our union with Christ through faith, we bear the fruit of good works. God’s justifying love creates what is pleasing and makes us attractive. Righteous deeds adorn the bride of Christ (cf. Rev. 19:7-8). Luther distinguishes between two kinds of righteousness: the righteousness of Christ and the righteousness of the believer.34 Christ’s righteousness is primary and the cause of the believer’s righteousness, which is secondary. Returning the marriage metaphor, “through the first righteousness arises the voice of the bridegroom who says to the soul, ‘I am yours,’ but through the second comes the voice of the bride who answers, ‘I am FALL 2017
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yours’…. Then the soul no longer seeks to be righteous in and for itself, but it has Christ as its righteousness and therefore seeks only the welfare of others.”35 God’s justifying love not only makes us lovely, but loving: “Behold, from faith thus flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a joyful, willing, and free mind that serves one’s neighbor willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss.”36 Justifying faith loves God and neighbour. Thus, the justified believer cannot be idle, but works “out of spontaneous love in obedience to God and considers nothing except the approval of God, whom he would most scrupulously obey in all things.”37 This is the obedience of faith, by which a believer not only joyfully worships and obeys God, but gladly seeks the welfare of others. Luther summarizes the mindset of the justified believer: He ought to think: “Although I am an unworthy and condemned man, my God has given me in Christ all the riches of righteousness and salvation without any merit on my part, out of pure, free mercy, so that from now on I need nothing except faith which believes that this is true. “The word of the Why should I not therefore freely, joyfully, with all my heart, and with Gospel breaks us, that an eager will do all things which I it might heal us; it know are pleasing and acceptable to strikes us down, and such a Father who has overwhelmed it will bind us up.” me with his inestimable riches? I will therefore give myself as a Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me; I will do nothing in this life except what I see is necessary, profitable, and salutary to my neighbor, since through faith I have an abundance of all good things in Christ.”38
The believer, who has been justified by his union with Christ through faith, is freed to love and joyfully serve his neighbour. God’s justifying love not only creates, it commissions. CONCLUSION: “COME, LET US RETURN TO THE LORD”
The prophet Hosea cried out to the people of FALL 2017
God, “Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.” (Hos. 6:1-2) Luther was simply repeating this prophetic call. For him, the word of the Gospel breaks us, that it might heal us; it strikes us down, and it will bind us up. By the word of the Gospel, God confronts sinners and executes the Old Adam in us, so that he might revive us and raise us up in the Last Adam. Thus, Luther cried out with Hosea, “Come, let us return to the Lord!” His cry was a call for repentance. Repentance is not simply a turning away from sin, but turning away from a self-centred striving for justification and approval from God and other people and turning in faith to Christ, who not only promises righteousness, salvation, and life, but also says to us, “I am yours and you are mine.” We know he means it, because he was nailed to the cross for our trespasses, and we know it’s true because he was raised for our justification. By faith we respond, “Yes, I am yours and you are mine.” Such faith was expressed by the Apostle Paul, when he declared, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Faith receives the love of Christ and unites us to him. Such faith works through love (cf. Gal. 5:6). Having been united with Christ through faith, we are liberated in Christ for loving and joyful service to God in worship and to our neighbour in charity.
1
“Vorrede zu Band I der Opera Latina der Wittenberger Ausgabe, 1545” in Luthers Werke in Auswahl, vol. 4, ed. Otto Clemen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), 421-428. English translation by Andrew Thornton, osb available online: http:// www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/preflat-eng.txt. 2 “Preface to Latin Works” (http://www.iclnet. org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/preflat-eng.txt).
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Unless otherwise stated, quotations from Scripture are from the English Standard Version (Crossway, 2011). Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Meridian, 1950), 47. Cited in Uuras Saarnivaara, Luther Discovers the Gospel (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951), 36-37. The German text can be found here: https://www.evangelischer-glaube. de/stimmen-der-v%C3%A4ter/luther-die-reformatorische-entdeckung/. The standard critical edition of Luther’s works in Latin and German is Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe [Schriften], 73 vols. (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883-2009) (hereafter abbreviated as WA). The standard English translation of Luther’s works is Luther’s Work (American Edition), ed. Helmut Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress/Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955-1986). Unless otherwise stated, English citations are from The Annotated Luther, ed. Timothy J. Wengert, 6 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017) (hereafter abbreviated as AL). Forensic (or legal) justification refers to the believer’s status of “not guilty” in God’s sight. Also, I don’t know much about it, but Heiko Oberman does: The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2000). Cf. Heiko Augustus Oberman, “Facientibus Quod in Se Est Deus Non Denegat Gratiam: Robert Holcot, OP and the Beginnings of Luther’s Theology” Harvard Theological Review 55, no. 4 (1962): 317-342; Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1985), 113. Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 55. Robert Kolb, “Luther on the theology of the cross,” Lutheran Quarterly 16, no. 4 (2002): 443. Cited in Scott H. Hendrix, Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 70.
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13 “The Heidelberg Disputation” (Latin text: WA 1, 355-74; English translation: AL 1, 80-120). 14 See especially Theses 3 and 10 (AL 1, 82). 15 AL 1, 83. 16 AL 1, 96-97. 17 WA 2, 354; AL 1, 83. 18 “A Sermon on the Meditation of Christ’s Holy Passion, 1519” (German text: WA 2, 136-42; English translation: AL 1, 169-78). Cf. Dennis Ngien’s excellent analysis of this sermon (Luther as a Spiritual Adviser: The Interface of Theology and Piety in Luther’s Devotional Writings, Studies in Christian History and Theology [Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2007], 1-28). 19 WA 2, 137. 20 AL 1, 173. 21 AL 1, 172. 22 AL 1, 175. 23 AL 1, 175. 24 AL 1, 176. 25 AL 1, 176-77. 26 AL 1, 85. 27 AL 1, 104-105. 28 “The Freedom of a Christian,” trans. W. A. Lambert in Three Treatises, 2d rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 286. Latin text: WA 7, 39-73. 29 WA 7, 55. 30 “The Freedom of a Christian,” 286. 31 WA 7, 55. 32 “The Freedom of a Christian,” 286-87. 33 “The Freedom of a Christian,” 311. 34 “Sermon on Two Kinds of Righteousness,” AL 2, 13-24. Latin text, WA 2, 145-52. 35 AL 2, 17). 36 “The Freedom of a Christian,” 304. 37 “The Freedom of a Christian,” 295. 38 “The Freedom of a Christian,” 304.
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REDEMPTION &
The Trouble with being “Cross-Centred”
REV. P. ANDREW SANDLIN REV. P. ANDREW SANDLIN is a Fellow of Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and President of the Centre for Cultural Leadership. He is an ordained minister in, and Executive Director of, the Fellowship of Mere Christianity, Preaching Pastor at Cornerstone Bible Church-Santa Cruz County, Faculty of Blackstone Legal Fellowship of the Alliance Defending Freedom, and De Jong Distinguished Visiting Professor of Culture and Theology, Edinburg Theological Seminary. He founded CCL in 2001 with the conviction that only eminently equipped cultural leaders will actually create a new Christian culture — and that only transformed Christians can transform the present anti-Christian culture of the West.
TWO THEOLOGICAL SLOGANS BECAME the watchwords of the Protestant Refor-
mation: Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) and Sola Fide (faith alone). The Protestant Reformers wanted to cut through the non-biblical traditions that had become such a part of the Western church’s faith and practice that they were set on a par with clearly biblical teachings. These nonbiblical views and practices included popery, penance, and purgatory. The Council of Trent later solidified Rome’s conviction that unwritten traditions are no less authoritative than the Bible itself. This, of course, the Reformers (rightly) could never abide.1
The issue of the relationship between God’s grace and human works in salvation had been unclear in the post-apostolic church from almost the very first. It was clear that salvation was “by grace,” and it was equally clear that God expected good works of his people. What was not fully understood is how these two were to be precisely related. By the late medieval period, in both East and West, salvation was defined largely as a cooperative effort — God got the ball rolling, but man had his part in keeping it rolling. In the Roman Catholic Church, God was understood to infuse grace at baptism; but man later cooperated with this grace and performed good works, which elicited God’s favor. It was still held that salvation was “It was clear that of grace, since God demonstrated his salvation was “by grace in his willingness to save on the ground of Christ’s death; but man had grace,” and it was his contribution to make, too.2 equally clear that
God expected good works of his people. What was not fully understood is how these two were to be precisely related.” FALL 2017
The Reformers were convinced (with the church father Augustine) that salvation is totally a work of God. They were confident, further, that faith played a more dominant role in appropriating salvation than the church had hitherto recognized. In fact, they believed that
justification, defined as God’s judicial declaration of man’s righteousness on account of Christ’s life and death, was appropriated by faith alone. Their heirs have called it the “instrumental cause” of justification. Faith, in other words, is certainly not the source of salvation, nor is it the ground of salvation, but it is the only instrument or means of salvation — and justification in particular. Since they believed that faith itself is a gift of God, this totally excluded good works as the means of justification and preserved salvation as totally God’s work. Like all great revivals in the history of the church, the Reformation left certain issues unaddressed.3 After all, no reformation is comprehensive, and no reformation could be expected to reform everything that needs reforming. The heirs of the Reformers, the Protestant scholastics, hardened the new insights of the Reformers into a dogmatic system, just as the medieval Schoolmen had created a dogmatic system of the earlier orthodox exegesis and Aristotle’s philosophy. Systemization is at the root of all scholasticism. One vital fact that tended to be obscured by some Reformed scholasticism was Christ Himself, whose redemptive work as such was not really an issue during the Reformation: both Rome and Reformed believed that Christ’s death on the cross redeemed man from sin. Because this was not at issue, it was not a prominent matter of discussion. When we read the Bible itself, of course, we see quite differently. In fact, there we observe that the Bible is an infallible record of redemptive history centering in Jesus Christ. The great “redemptive complex” of his birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, session, and future Second Coming form the heart of the Bible — and of Christianity.4 In fact, this redemptive complex and its implications are what Christianity is all about. If we are to look for the key to the Bible Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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and the entire Christian faith, the only possible answer we can come up with is sola Christus: Christ alone. This by no means detracts from the fullness of God — orthodox, biblical Trinitarianism — it simply means that Jesus Christ is the central figure and Mediator of God’s dealings with man (Jn. 14:6; Ac. 4:12; 1 Tim. 2:5).5 Jesus Christ’s work in history is the intersecting point of what I call the four segments of the Christian quadrilateral: history, doctrine, experience, and community. You can’t take away one of these factors and still have Christianity, but more important than any of them is the One around whom the entire scheme revolves — our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. When we lose this Christocentric (Christ-centered) focus, we begin to lose the Faith itself. We then think, for example, that the Faith is mainly about abstract theological propositions; if we can just dot our theological t’s and cross our dogmatic i’s, we will be all right. Or, on the other hand, if we can just capture that “greater experience” — that feeling closeness to God, that filling of the Spirit, or what have you — we will have reached the Christian summit. Or, if we can just get into the right (perfect) church, with the right community of saints who love and care for God and for each other, we will have arrived. History, doctrine, experience, and community are essential to the Faith, but they are not the Faith. Jesus Christ Himself is the Faith. Intelligent people often get sucked into a dogmatically-centered faith. Emotional people often get sucked into an experience-centered faith. Relational people often get sucked into a community-centered faith. Dogma, experience and community are good in their place, and those places are essential — there can be no true Christianity without them. But they are not the foundation of our Faith. Jesus Christ in his Person and Work is the foundation of our Faith (Eph. 2:20). This is why the New Testament apostles so relentlessly preached faith in the crucified and risen Lord as man’s only hope (1 Cor. 2:2; 15:1-4; 1 Jn. 5:12). From this Christocentricity flows changed individuals, families, churches, societies, nations, and civilizations.6 The worldwide transformation predicted by the Old Testament prophets is the result of a Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
worldwide Christ-centeredness (Phil. 2:511). The answer to the world’s evil and sin, therefore, is not more shrewd, glossy evangelistic or political strategies; or more precise, academic theology; or greater Christian emotion and experience. A changed world is a result of changing the focus of the entire world to the One by Whom it consists, or is held together (Col. 1:15-17). For man made in the image of God, solus Christus (Christ alone) will — and must — suffice.
“Jesus Christ’s work in history is the intersecting point of what I call the four segments of the Christian quadrilateral: history, doctrine, experience, and community.”
THE TROUBLE WITH BEING “CROSSCENTERED”
We hear the term “cross-centered” a lot these days. It is an understandable expression. In a time when our Lord’s precious death (1 Pet. 1:18-19) is termed “cosmic child abuse” by alleged evangelicals, we could use a revival of love for and preaching about our Lord’s sacrificial death on the cross. But some churches and denominations want to do more. They position themselves as stressing Jesus’ crucifixion even more than his glorious, bodily resurrection. They see the crucifixion as the top point of the Gospel and everything else subordinated to it.7 I believe this well-intentioned perspective is mistaken. I will offer three basic theses on the relative emphases of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection to show why. I will also show the practical implications of over-emphasizing the crucifixion. We must love and glory in the crucifixion, but it is not right to be “cross-centered.”8 THREE STAGGERING THESES ON THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS
Jesus’ resurrection, like his crucifixion, saves us. We all know that the resurrection is a central fact of the Gospel (1 Cor. 15:1–8), but it is clearer to many of us how Christ’s death saves us than how his resurrection saves us. In some cases, we get the idea that the prime role of the resurrection is simply to confirm the deity and Messianic role of Jesus (Rom. 1:1–4). This fact is true as far as it goes, but if we think this way, we might fail FALL 2017
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to grasp in what specific sense the resurrection should be part of the Gospel at all. After all, the fact that Jesus is God as well as the Messiah is not a distinctively Gospel truth — you can believe it and still not be a Christian. Moreover, despite the many theories of the atonement, it is easy to understand how Jesus’ death saves “...the fact that Jesus us — primarily by his suffering on the cross the penalty for sin that is due is God as well as us (1 Pet. 2:24). He also destroys the the Messiah is not a power of sin, Satan’s stranglehold on distinctively Gospel us, a view often called Christus Victor truth — you can (Heb. 2:14-15).
believe it and still not be a Christian.”
But how does his resurrection save us? If we see the Gospel as designed principally to address the issue of the penalty of sin, we might scratch our heads as to the Gospel significance of Jesus’ resurrection. If however, we recognize a “fourfold salvation” — salvation not just from the penalty but also from the power, pleasure and presence of sin — we will get a better idea of the resurrection’s role in saving us.9 Paul tells the Romans that if in union with Jesus’ death we ourselves have died to sin, it no longer enslaves us (6:2). But the power actually to walk in the new life is an effect of our union with the resurrected Lord (6:3-12; 8:10-11). Jesus’ death paid the penalty for sin and broke its judicial power in us; but had he remained dead, we could not be saved. The massive significance of this fact should not be missed. Paul says that if Christ is dead, we are still in our sins (1 Cor. 15:17). This is as much as to say that Christ’s penalty-erasing sacrifice on the cross by itself is insufficient to save us. It is not enough that our sins are paid for, for us to be saved. Had Jesus merely commended his spirit to his Father (Lk. 23:46) but remained bodily in the grave, the Son of God could have resumed his pre-incarnate existence, and his death would have, theoretically speaking, atoned for sinners, but none of them could have been saved. Atoning death is necessary for salvation, but not sufficient. Resurrection is no less necessary. The reason that our Lord’s death is insufficient of itself to save cuts to the heart of the issue. The very purpose of salvation is man’s victory over sin — existential
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victory, not just judicial victory (Eph. 1:1-4; Tit. 2:14-15; 1 Pet. 2:24) — and that victory is, as we have seen, a direct benefit of union with our Lord’s resurrection, not just his death. Another way of putting this is to say that persevering obedience is no less a Gospel gift than justification and forgiveness of sins. If, however, we believe the Gospel is predominantly about forgiveness of sins and only derivatively about persevering obedience, we might fail to grasp the significance of the resurrection to the Gospel. Jesus died on the cross and rose from the tomb to secure the salvation of an obedient, world- and sin-conquering people (2 Tim. 2:11-12). This is what baptism into the crucified-resurrected Lord secures. We might also understand this fact better if we realized that the resurrection is not simply an extension of the redemptive work of the crucifixion, whose overwhelming glow the resurrection reflects. The truth is more nearly the reverse: the resurrection is the grand crescendo toward which Jesus’ redeeming ministry pressed. The Lordship of the resurrected Christ is the central theme of the Bible. The great theme of the Bible is not “Jesus saves,” but that first Christian creed, “Jesus is Lord.”10 Peter’s sermon at the first post-resurrection Pentecost confirms this truth. Peter sees in Jesus’ resurrection-ascension the fulfillment of the promise to David that of his descendants God would establish an eternal rule in the earth (Ac. 2:30–33). In this (resurrectionascension) way, God “made this man Jesus...both Lord and Christ” (v. 36). On this basis the Jews who collaborated in our Lord’s murder, under potent Spirit conviction, begged to know what they should do. Peter’s response was, “Repent, and be baptized” — that is, visibly attest your faith in the risen Lord. The Lordship message generates the Gospel. Paul says much the same thing in the beginning of Romans (1:1–5). Jesus, David’s royal seed, was declared to be God’s Son by his resurrection and the message of obedient faith in this risen Lord for all nations was committed to Paul. Then we learn (1:16f.) how individuals get in on this Global Lordship Plan. Resurrection is at the heart of the Lordship GosEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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pel because in the resurrection (and resultant ascension) Jesus was authenticated and qualified as God’s mediatorial ruler of a world called to submit to an obedient faith (Rom. 15:18-20; 16:2526). Because of his humble obedience that took him to the cross, God has exalted the risen Lord to whom every knee will bow (Phil. 2:5-11). “Jesus saves” because God has rewarded his obedient faithfulness in his sacrificial death with the resurrection power of universal Lordship. The crucified and risen one is King of Kings and Lord of Lords (Rev. 19:15-16). All who swear fealty to the reigning King who shed his life’s blood for the world will be pardoned and justified (credited with Jesus’ own righteousness) and granted a persevering faith that will lead them to victory through the great battles of this life (Rom. 5:1819; 6:12-19; 8:31-39). Individual salvation is a benefit of incorporation into the crucified and resurrected Lord. But it is the reign of the resurrected Lord that is fundamental. Christians can today encounter the crucified Lord only in the mode of his resurrection existence. This truth sounds a lot more arcane than it actually is, but I want to spend a little time developing it, because it, more than any other, shows why the resurrection is arguably the most pivotal aspect of the Gospel. We know that before his incarnation the Son of God existed eternally with the Father (Jn. 1:14). Like the Father and Holy Spirit, the Son was pure spirit. He was God in the same sense that they were — and are. In eternity past, there were three divine Persons, spirit Beings, yet one God. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he entered a new mode of existence. He was no less the Son of God, but he was the Son of God in a different way. Because his deity joined (though was not confused with) humanity as Jesus of Nazareth, it was necessary that God’s Son surrender some of the prerogatives of deity (not deity itself, mind you), because man is not God (Phil. 2:5–8). For example, he was not omniscient (Mk. 13:32). He could be tempted and get tired and sleep and even die. In fact, he was human in every way we are, though he was not a sinner (Heb. 4:15–16). These are not characteristics of God the Son in Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
his pre-incarnate state; his earthly life was a different way of being. We should thank God for this fact. Otherwise, God’s Son could not have saved us (Gal. 4:4). But — and this point is often missed — Jesus entered a third (and final) mode of existence in his resurrection, or, perhaps more accurately, in his resurrection-ascension. “Jesus’ earthly He was neither pre-incarnate nor merely existence was not incarnate, but resurrection-incarnate. He his resurrection was the Son of God in a different way than existence. It is the in both his heavenly pre-incarnate and his same Jesus, but earthly incarnate modes of existence. Jesus he is a changed himself was transformed when he rose from the dead.11 When Jesus died, he died in Man.” weakness; but he was raised in power (1 Cor. 15:42–45). We have clear instances of this resurrectionascension Jesus. Peter preached at the first postresurrection Pentecost that the one whom the Jews had slain is no longer in humiliation but ruling from the heavens on David’s throne (Ac. 2:29–39). This is the Jesus that Stephen the martyr saw as he was poised to die: the ascensionresurrection Jesus standing on the right hand of the Father, in great power and glory and victory (Ac. 7:54-60). Likewise, Paul’s conversion experience highlights the “new Jesus,” whose brightness blinded Paul and whose booming voice threw him from his horse and rendered his companions speechless (Ac. 9:1-9). Then, we see the resurrection Jesus in his full regal splendor in the book of Revelation: his flaming eyes and oceanic voice and sunblinding countenance (Rev. 1:12-17). This is the incarnate-resurrection Jesus with the power of life and death, King of kings and Lord of lords, who makes war with his enemies and crushes them in his blinding might (Rev. 19:11-21). This is most emphatically not the Jesus of his humiliating, incarnate state. It is the same Jesus in his being, but he has a different way of being. In other words, Jesus’ earthly existence was not his resurrection existence. It is the same Jesus, but he is a changed Man. This leads to a rather exciting, if jarring, conclusion: the mode of Jesus of the Gospel accounts is FALL 2017
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not the mode of Jesus that we encounter today. We have no access to the Jesus of his earthly, preresurrection sojourn. When we were saved, we were united to the resur“... for the Christian, rection Jesus — not the Jesus that the there can be no first apostles encountered in ancient Israel. Because Jesus is a changed man, death without a and because we are united to him in resurrection, just as his resurrection (Rom. 6:3-5), we for Christ there could are changed men and women (v. 4, not be.” “walk[ing] in newness of life”). That is how God changes us. God changes us by having changed Jesus. What are the implications for Christians? When Jesus died, he was bound by sin. Sin had power over him — not his sin, of course, but ours (v. 9). Before Jesus rose, sin and death had power over him. Jesus was enslaved to the power of sin —ours. He carried our sin, our grief and sorrows (Is. 53). His life was one of weakness and illness and weariness and tragedy and loneliness — the life of sin-bearing. Sin (our sin) which he carried during his earthly life, had power over him. This is the earthly Jesus, the Son of God whom we read about in the Gospels. This is the life of Jesus all the way to the cross and to the tomb. If you want to know the “life of Christ” according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it was preeminently a life of weakness, grief, burdens, illness, hardship — on the cross it was even a life separated from God the Father, who abandoned his own Son, the Son who carried our sins (Mt. 27:46). The momentous teaching of Romans 6, 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 5 is that in that empty tomb 2000 years ago, Jesus left that life behind forever. Jesus was transformed. To elaborate: when Jesus rose from the grave, he abandoned that humble, earthly way of life for a new life. He was sown in weakness; he was raised in power. He gave up his life of sin-bearing and weakness and loneliness and defeat for a life of power and joy and communion and victory. The old Man Jesus became the New Man Jesus. Jesus had an old man and a new man (Paul’s language), just like we do. And the old Man Jesus is gone forever. Paul makes much the same point in 2 Corinthians 5:16–17, where he is talking about FALL 2017
the resurrection. He says that even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, that is, in a natural way, yet now we do not know him that way. We cannot know Jesus as we once knew him. He has changed, and we have changed. If you want to know the Jesus that now exists, read the book of Revelation. In Revelation, he is the conquering King, progressively beating down the old dragon (Satan); punishing his enemies on earth who are at war with him; and delivering his people, who love and obey him. He is not just the Lamb who had been slain but the Lion who flexes his authority over the earth. He is the Jesus at whose holy, horrifying presence John fell down as dead. This Jesus, not the Jesus of the Gospels, is the Jesus alive today. This fact has further staggering implications for Paul — and us. It means that since Jesus has a new mode of existence, a new life, we do also. We are united to him, so when he died to sin, we died to it also. When he rose to righteousness, we rose also. Why is it necessary to be united with Jesus? Because that is God’s way of destroying sin! (Read Rom. 6:6 carefully). Understand, therefore: we can no longer encounter — no longer have a personal relationship with — the crucified Lord. We can only encounter and relate to and love and befriend the crucified Lord in his resurrected state. What kind of existence does Jesus have today? Can he die (v. 9)? Can his life today be filled with sin-bearing, sorrow, loneliness and weakness? No. Neither must ours. That is Paul’s point in Romans 6. Jesus calls us to take up our cross daily and follow him (Lk. 9:23). Paul says that he dies daily (1 Cor. 15:31). And in passages like Matthew 10:38, 2 Corinthians 1:5–7, 4:10, Philippians 3:10, and Colossians 1:24, we are informed that our present life must include suffering, just as our Lord’s earthly life did. But for the Christian, there can be no death without a resurrection, just as for Christ there could not be. Every death entails a resurrection, including our future physical death and future resurrection. But our resurrection is not merely future. In the present life, we cannot die every day to sin and self without also being resurrected to righteousness and power and hope and joy and glory and Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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victory. Christians do not live the “crucified life;” they live the resurrection life. When we suffer, when we are lonely, when we are ill, when we are weak, we appeal to Jesus, but only to the Jesus who lives today in constant victory over loneliness, suffering, illness, weakness. In other words, we cannot encounter a Jesus who knows only loneliness, suffering, illness, weakness, because that Jesus no longer exists. We can only encounter a Jesus who has defeated all of these. And if we are united to him, we have also defeated them. We simply must live a life of resurrection — dead to sin, alive to Jesus (Rom. 6:11-12). There is simply no other Christian life. The wife of the best man in my wedding is a remarkable woman. I have known her for 40 years. Months after they were married, she and my best man were T-boned by a drunk driver. He was thrown clear, but her backbone was crushed. She was paralyzed and has been a paraplegic for over 30 years. I knew her when she was a teenager in full bloom and health. I cannot know her that way anymore. She is a new and different woman. Her life has been transformed. In the same way, I cannot know the “old” Jesus that walked the earth. I can only know the “new” Jesus that rules in Heaven (1 Cor. 15:47-49). To those who want to know Jesus in his pain and suffering and agony and weakness, who want Jesus to join you in wallowing in your self-doubt and failure and weakness, who desire for him to be your partner in misery: You’re too late; you missed him; you’re 2000 years too late. That Jesus has been transformed. He is now the Lord of glory, not the Jesus of the earth. When we come to Jesus for empathy and care and help (Heb. 4:14-16), we can come only to Jesus the Victor, not Jesus the Victim. He can identify with our weaknesses and sorrows ands temptation, but he cannot identify with us in defeat — only in defeat swallowed up in victory (Heb. 4:14–16; cf. 7:26–27; 8:1–2, 7–13; 11:4–40; 12:22–29). He can no longer identify with the three Hebrew boys who might perish in the fire; He can only identify with three Hebrew boys who are victorious over the fire. Your way of thinking and mine must be dominated daily by this one fact — the Lord we love and serve is the risen Lord, the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Lord of victory and power and hope and joy and transformation. There is no other Lord. Jesus is incapable of commiserating with a life of defeat. He can only lead us from defeat to victory. “the Jesus knows no other way. Too many Christians live as though Jesus is still buried in the ground. But that Jesus is gone forever. There is no other Jesus to love and serve. The risen Lord is the only Lord there is. The victorious Lord is the only Lord there is. The joyous Lord is the only Lord there is. The powerful Lord is the only Lord there is. It is this Lord to whom we are united. Paul’s point: there is no other Christian life possible except the life of victory and joy and power and hope and worldwide transformation (1 Cor. 15:56–58; 1 Jn. 5:4). For this reason it may be most prudent not to say that we are “cross-centered.” It is better to say “Lordship-centered,” because this Lordship is the key to the resurrection, just as the resurrection is the key to the Gospel. It is the risen Jesus whom we serve, and there is simply no other Jesus.
Lord we love and serve is the risen Lord, the Lord of victory and power and hope and joy and transformation. There is no other Lord.”
A DISGRACEFUL GRACE
Many twenty- and thirty-somethings (and older Christians too) are heavily vested in a message and lifestyle that highlights God’s grace and decries “judgmentalism.” They are devoted to this message of gracious non-judgmentalism. And this posture is not surprising. They fornicate and avoid the church and otherwise commit obvious and flagrant sins of which they are blissfully unrepentant. They are bold, however, in complaining about “judgmental” Christians who dare to tell other people how to live and to whom they must give an account for their behavior. Christianity is about grace, they opine, not about holding other Christians to high moral standards. This perspective reflects a wider trend in the church to champion grace as the antithesis of holiness, which is often identified as moralism (turning Christianity into a system of moral regulations) or Phariseeism (looking down on everyone else from a hypocritical moral plateau). In reality, this “grace revival” is little more than antinomianism (lawlessness) under the guise of grace. FALL 2017
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A BIBLICAL VIEW OF GRACE
God’s grace is a precious and central teaching of the Bible. Like God’s mercy, defined as his withholding the judgment our sins deserve, grace is God’s bestowing blessings that we do not deserve. God is gracious toward all humanity (Mt. 5:45), but the highest form of God’s grace is his redemptive grace exhibited in Jesus Christ. Despite our sins, God gives us eternal “... Like God’s mercy, life in his Son Jesus (Eph. 2:1-7). But defined as his even more remarkably, he showers this withholding the grace by purging our sins in the selfgiving of his Son on the cross and in judgment our sins his bodily resurrection (Rom. 3:21-26; deserve, grace is 4:25). God does not overlook our sin God’s bestowing (he would not be righteous if he did blessings that we do this [Rom. 3:9-26]), but he punished not deserve.” his own Son in our place (2 Cor. 5:21). This is a most gracious display of God’s grace imaginable. But grace means even more than this. It means that God does not convey salvation to us by our works or virtue. In other words, salvation by grace does not mean only that God graciously gave his Son to save us; it also means that there is no way we can appropriate that salvation except by his grace — not by our works (Eph. 2:8-9). Why is salvation by grace alone and not by grace and works? Because if salvation were by grace and by works, man could boast, and God wants to assure that we boast only in him (1 Cor. 1:30-31). Salvation is by grace so that God alone gets the glory. THE PERVERSION OF GRACE
But this is not everything that needs to be said about grace. If we know that God will save us in spite of our sins, we might get the idea that sin is not a big deal. We may even come to assume that sin plays a favorable part in God’s plan since it accents his grace. Paul addressed this very issue two thousand years ago. Since Paul preached that salvation is by grace to all persons, both Jew and Gentile, who trust in Jesus, he was (slanderously) accused of teaching that we may sin that God’s grace could abound more and more (Rom. 3:8; cf. 6:1-2). After all, if salvation is by God’s grace; FALL 2017
if that grace is highlighted when people see how God forgives the greatest of sinners; if, in short, man’s sin is necessary to exalt by contrast the grace of God, why not keep on sinning so that God’s grace will get the greatest possible honor? Paul’s answer is, NO WAY! Paul considers his accusers’ view a perversion of grace. He writes in Titus 2:11-12: “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in the present age....” Grace teaches that we must live holy lives. Paul writes that we must not sin that grace may abound, because the very reason Jesus died and rose for us is so that we “should walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:1-4). In other words, grace is not a stand-alone idea. God does not want us to glorify him for his grace in saving us only from the penalty of sin (“Praise God, I am relieved that he got rid of the punishment due for my past sins”). He also wants us to glorify him for his grace in saving us from the power and pleasure of sin (“Praise God, his salvation delivers me from enslavement to and delight in present and future sins”). We have no right to say, “Praise God that he has saved me from his judgment by Jesus’ death for me” if we do not also say, “Praise God that he has saved me from sin’s grip on my life and is leading me by his Spirit to live in holiness before him.” Of course, there are moralists and Pharisees. Moralists refuse to see that we obey God’s law and live holy lives because of God’s glorious grace manifested in the precious blood of Jesus that he shed on the cross to purchase our salvation. We obey because we are not our own; we are bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:19-20). God’s law flows out of the gracious love of his heart displayed in the Gospel. There is no room for moralism. But please note that the flaw of the moralists is not in their stressing morality but in their refusing to see that morality is anchored in God’s grace and his Gospel. God’s law is not the problem; sinful man is the problem. Nor is there room for Pharisaism. Modern Pharisees pridefully judge everyone else by their own Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Solus Christus
morality. This is sinful, and Jesus denounces this sin and related ones (Mt. 23). It is important to note, however, that Jesus does not criticize the Pharisees for holding people to the Bible’s (the Old Testament’s) moral standard. He criticizes them for erecting their own moral standards that compete with the Bible’s standards (Mk. 7:8-9) and for not knowing and believing and obeying the very Bible they claim to be upholding (Jn. 5:47). So, the error of the Pharisees was not in reprimanding sinners but in not doing this on the basis of the Bible and in not obeying that Bible themselves. THE JUDGMENTALISM OF NONJUDGMENTALISM
This leads to a final, vital point. The Bible knows nothing about non-judgmentalism, if this means that Christians may not judge others. The Bible highlights a grace that forgives repentant sinners (Ac. 2:38; 3:19), but it is devoid of a grace that refuses to rebuke the sin that offends God. Non-judgmentalists are fond of quoting Jesus in Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” Yet they often fail to continue reading. Jesus prohibits hypocritical judgment (“[W]ith what judgment you judge, you will be judged,” v. 2), but he requires us to judge false teaching by its bitter fruits (vv. 15-20). Hypocritical judgment is evil, but not all judgment is hypocritical, and we are required by God to judge humbly and righteously by his standards. The early Christians judged. Paul judged (Gal. 1:6-10). Peter judged (2 Pet. 2:12-22). John judged (2 Jn. 7-11). The great saints of the Old Testament like Noah and Moses and Abraham and David and Elijah and Isaiah and Jonah judged. We ourselves are required to rebuke evil and have no company with it (Eph. 5:11-13). What many of today’s grace-talking non-judgmentalists actually want is a grandfatherly God who overlooks their rebellion and favors them despite their gross, unrepentant sin. They want to fornicate, despise God’s church and its ordinances, consume pornography, abuse prescription (and illegal) drugs, profane God’s name, revel in lewdness, spurn the godly counsel of parents and Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
pastors and teachers, eschew hard work, and otherwise lust to be accepted by an apostate, pagan culture — all while assuming the pious protection of God’s grace. IMBALANCED TEACHERS
Certain pastors and theologians have not been helpful in combating this travesty of grace. They have correctly stressed God’s matchless grace in salvation, but their stress has been imbalanced. They have not also stressed that salvation by grace requires holiness and obedience. They teach — or seem to teach — either that sin is not all that serious or that it is serious but that Jesus’ atonement for sin means that our sins are “God’s grace was already paid for and that therefore we need never designed not take them too seriously. But God’s to diminish our grace was never designed to diminish our estimate of sin estimate of sin nor our battle to overcome it. God’s grace does not cover unrepentant nor our battle to sin. God’s grace is not a blank check to overcome it. God’s sin. God’s grace is not unconditional — grace does not it is conditioned on faith, confession and cover unrepentant repentance (Mt. 6:14; Heb. 4:1-10; 1 Jn. sin.” 1:9). Any Christian teacher who assures his listeners or readers of salvation by grace but who does not go on to show that grace demands and necessitates holiness is not being true to the totality of the biblical message. Anyone who can read the sequence of Paul’s argument in Romans 1–8 (“We are justified by faith and not by works; therefore, be holy”) or in Ephesians 1–5 (“We are chosen by God and united to Jesus by grace and not by works; therefore, walk in the light”) and come to another conclusion needs to reconsider his ministerial credentials. Paul was not just the great Theologian of Grace. He was also and equally the great Theologian of Obedience. Christians who truly know the grace of God grasp the terrible price that Jesus paid on the cross in suffering for our sins. They know that the sin that sent Jesus to the cross — our sin — offends and saddens God. They know that the cross is the greatest display not only of the grace of God but also of God’s hatred of sin. They want to hate sin as much as a still-sinful human can hate it, and FALL 2017
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they want to avoid it as aggressively as they can until they meet their Lord and enjoy undiminished purity in his presence. For that reason, they can never — would never — use grace as an excuse for sin. That would a disgraceful grace indeed. TWO KINDS OF SINNERS
The great division within humanity is not sexual, economic, racial, or social, but religious. The great divide is captured by expressions like the City of God versus the City of Man (Augustine), covenant-keepers versus covenantbreakers (Cornelius Van Til), and “Heirs of the by more explicitly biblical terms like Protestant saved versus unsaved (Ac. 16:30) and Reformation, we Christians versus non-Christians (Ac. rightly stress God’s 11:26). Another way of expressing grace, but that very this distinction is to refer to repentant sinners versus unrepentant sinners. stress sometimes leads This final designation has the benefit to moral paralysis” of highlighting the reality of universal human sinfulness while implying the ethical benefits of Jesus Christ’s redemptive work — notably, his creating a new and holy people by the Spirit’s power (Rom. 6:1-12; 8:9-14). Repentant sinners are still sinners, but, being recipients of God’s grace consistently working in their lives, they have become a different kind of sinner. They may be sinners, but they are not sinners in the way they once were. A striking example of these two kinds of sinners is found in the initial segment of the book of Habakkuk. This book consists of alternating monologues between God and the prophet. In 1:1-5, Habakkuk (like many other biblical prophets) decries the violence, injustice and otherwise depravity of his fellow Jews. Keenly aware of God’s covenant threats in texts like Deuteronomy 28, he grieves at God’s apparent diffidence over the depravity of his people. God had plucked Israel from the depraved, pagan nations of the earth and graciously lifted them up on eagles’ wings to be a unique, righteous people to him (Ex. 19:4-6). But in Habakkuk’s time, righteous they were not; they were tragically unrighteous. And Habakkuk was as incensed by their unrighteousness as he was with God’s seeming indifference at his people’s moral apostasy.
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THE EVANGELICAL QUANDARY OF GRACE
The prophet’s attitude might be thought to introduce a quandary among today’s evangelicals. Heirs of the Protestant Reformation, we rightly stress God’s grace, but that very stress sometimes leads to moral paralysis, the very opposite of how Habakkuk responded to rampant sin so many centuries ago. Today’s paradigm goes something like this: we observe obvious sin and abject depravity in both the church and the culture — let us take as an example the mainstreamed sadomasochism of Lady Gaga, who revels in musical rape fantasies and violence against women — but we recoil from the loud denunciation of this evil with which Habakkuk might have been quite comfortable, on the grounds that we, too, like Lady Gaga, are sinners.12 If we are saved by grace and not works — and we emphatically are (Tit. 3:5) — the only reason we are different from Lady Gaga is God’s favor displayed and accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This means that no Christian can boast that he is morally superior to another (Rom. 3:27-28). God is the one who creates the difference between the forgiven and the unforgiven (Eph. 2:110). At the very root, we might think, we are really no better than Lady Gaga. Yet it is not entirely clear that Habakkuk could have so aggressively decried Israel’s sin had he thought in precisely this way. Our modern evangelical way of approaching moral evil in the church and world was not Habakkuk’s way. Another quandary emerges almost immediately. “There is none righteous, no, not one,” writes Paul (Rom. 3:10, summarizing Psalm 14), yet the Bible clearly and plainly depicts certain believers as righteous, and it commends this righteousness. The Psalms are replete with mention and descriptions of “the righteous man” (try chapters 1, 11, 34, 37, and 58 — for starters). Likewise, Jesus spoke of righteous individuals (Mt. 10:41; 13:17, 43; 25:46). So did Paul himself (Rom. 2:6-11; 6:18; 14:7; Eph. 4:24). The world may be full of sinners (Lady Gaga in the lead), but there are righteous individuals in God’s sight. TWO KINDS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
A typical evangelical way out of this quandary — one creditably calculated to highlight the grace Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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of God and prevent any boasting of one’s righteousness — is to say that this righteousness is the “positional” or judicial righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed (or credited) to the believing sinner. The Bible most assuredly teaches this kind of righteousness. Both Jesus (Lk. 18:9-14) and Paul (Rom. 4:11-24) refer to this imputed righteousness as the basis on which we are accepted before a holy God. We are not accepted before God on the strength of our own righteousness but on the strength of Jesus’ righteousness. His righteous standing accomplished by his death and resurrection becomes ours by faith alone, not by works. Yet in many cases, the definition of the righteousness of individuals depicted as righteous in the Bible cannot be this positional or judicial righteousness: they are actually, existentially righteous (see Lk. 1:5-6; Jas. 5:16; 2 Pet. 2:8). They live righteous lives. They love God. They obey his Word. They hate sin (including their own sin [Ps. 51; Is. 6:5]). They are sinners, but they wish to please God in all that they do. They do enjoy imputed righteousness, but they also are the recipients of imparted righteousness: God has imparted to them the Holy Spirit’s power and (gradually) works into them his righteousness (Rom. 8:117). They are righteous, both judicially and experientially, by faith. These are the relatively rather than the absolutely righteous (only God is absolutely righteous), but the Bible does not hesitate to depict these repentant sinners as righteous — conforming to God’s holy will. They are commended for this righteousness and held up as favorable examples. This distinction discloses more fully the reality of the two kinds of sinners: the repentant and the unrepentant. The Bible calls repentant sinners “the righteous” (and similar terms). It labels unrepentant sinners “the unrighteous” (and similar terms). There is a huge gulf separating these two groups, and that gulf cannot be bridged by simply lumping all of them together as sinners. The gulf is so absolute that in the Final Judgment it will eternally isolate all of humanity in one of two places: heaven or hell (Mt. 25:31-46). Of course, all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory (Rom. 3:23). There is no righteous man on earth that does not sin (Ec. 7:20). If we say that Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
we are without sin, we are liars (1 Jn. 1:10). But there has been a dramatic change in repentant sinners that has led and will lead increasingly to righteous living. In fact, John sees this righteousness as a criterion of authentic belief (1 Jn. 3:6, 5:18) — if we live lives dominated by unrighteousness, our Christian profession rings hollow. The right-living people are saved and the wrongliving people are lost. It is remarkable that some Christians, worried that God’s grace will be polluted if they stress the necessity of righteousness, refuse to affirm what the Bible so plainly teaches: that the righteous will end up in “The Bible calls heaven and the unrighteous will end up repentant sinners in hell (Mt. 13:41-43; 25:31-46; Jn. 5:29; ‘the righteous’. It Rom. 2:6-9; Heb. 10:32-39; Rev. 21:7, 8, 24-27). labels unrepentant For this reason, when Habakkuk decried his fellow Jews’ depravity and apostasy, God did not respond, “But Habakkuk, you, too, are a sinner; you are really no better than these other Jews, who love violence and injustice and hate my law. You were saved by my sovereign grace and have no warrant to set yourself up to criticize their sin. Revel in my grace, Habakkuk, for there but for my grace go you!” God did not say this, nor (to my knowledge) does God ever reply this way when the righteous (repentant sinners) criticize or condemn the unrighteous (unrepentant sinners). In short, God affirms (implicitly or explicitly) the assessment that his righteous people level at the unrighteous. These sinners occupy two entirely different classes.
sinners ‘the unrighteous’. There is a huge gulf separating these two groups, and that gulf cannot be bridged by simply lumping all of them together as sinners.”
ARE CHRISTIANS BETTER THAN EVERYBODY ELSE?
Christians sometimes exhort, with well-intentioned humility: “We should not act as though we are better than everyone else in the world. After all, we are saved by grace.” Yet, if we are not better than unbelievers, what is salvation by grace all about? Not, surely, only eternal bliss, blessed though it will be. It would be a tragedy indeed if heaven were populated by unrepentant, depraved sinners. This would be hell, not heaven (Rev. 21:8). Heaven is reserved for those who have FALL 2017
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been saved by grace through faith in the blood and resurrection of Jesus and who, therefore, have been cleansed of sin and live as obedient, persevering sons and daughters (Rom. 2:6-7; Heb. 12:14; Rev. 21:7). The goal of God’s grace is a right-living (righteous) people. Paul writes, “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age…” (Tit. 2:11-12, emphasis added). The goal of God’s grace is not Christians who so marvel at that grace that they fear righteousness. Grace necessitates — and produces — righteousness. Today amid the din of religious apostasy and cultural depravity, a misguided piety may foster the attitude: “I am saved by the blood of Jesus and totally by grace. I do not see any moral difference between me and unrepentant sinners. After all, it is only grace that separates me from Lady Gaga.” But that “only” modifying God’s grace in our salvation is a massive “only.” It is a grace that transforms a rebel into an obedient child and situates him on the path of righteousness. He loves what God loves and hates what God hates. He perseveres in righteousness by the Spirit’s power to press the Lordship of Jesus everywhere he can. He knows that all he is and does in the way of righteousness is God’s gift working for him (imputed righteousness) and in him (imparted righteousness). He rejoices in God’s grace that redeemed him not just from the penalty of sin but also, now, in this life, from the pleasure and power of sin and one day, in eternity, from the very presence of sin. God anointed Jesus because he loved righteousness and hated lawlessness (Heb. 1:9). So should we. Eternal life is not a reward for good behavior, but neither is grace an excuse for moral paralysis.
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G. C. Berkouwer, Faith and Justification (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), ch. 3 and passim. See Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification - The Beginnings to the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
3
Norman Shepherd, The Call of Grace (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R), 4-6. 4 Oscar Cullmann, Salvation in History (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1967). 5 Idem., The Earliest Christian Confessions (London: Lutterworth Press, 1949), 39-41. 6 Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1960). 7 For example, see the Sovereign Grace Ministries position articulated by Jeff Purswell in “The Cross and Resurrection” series: sovereigngraceministries.org. 8 The term “cross” is not always equal to “crucifixion” in the Bible. Sometimes it is shorthand for the entire Gospel. When Paul writes that he gloried only in the cross (Gal. 6:14), he did not mean to say that he excluded a huge part of the Gospel, including the resurrection, in his glorying (1 Cor. 15:1–4). Even when he says that when he ministered among the Corinthians, he wanted to know nothing but Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2), he obviously had not limited his message to the crucifixion. 1 Corinthians 1–2 makes clear that his contrast is between the simple Gospel that he preached and the sophisticated paganism of the surrounding classical culture at Corinth. 9 This formulation comes from A.W. Pink, A Fourfold Salvation: Rescue from the Pleasure, Penalty, Power, and Presence of Sin (Pensacola: Chapel Library, 2006), http://www.chapellibrary.org/files/4413/9930/8071/fsal.pdf. 10 Oscar Cullmann, The Earliest Christian Confessions (London: Lutterworth Press, 1949), 23. 11 This is Richard Gaffin’s brilliant observation in Richard Gaffin, Resurrection and Redemption (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1978, 1987), 78-92. 12 Emily Esfahani Smith, “The Pop Singer as Ultimate Predator,” The Wall Street Journal, last modified April 7, 2010, https://www.wsj.com/ articles/SB10001424052702303411604575167 821091223394#printMode
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
LAW and CULTURAL
REFORMATION: Augustine, Calvin & the Puritans
on God’s Law and Society
Editor’s note: This article is based on material that originally appeared in Joseph Boot, The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society (Toronto: Ezra Press, 2016). CULTURAL CAPTIVITY OR CULTURAL REFORM
Alexis de Tocqueville once said that when the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness. As a historically orthodox and consistently scriptural faith has waned in Western churches, especially over the past century or so, a Christian vision of the family, morality, law, education, economics, arts and political life – in short, culture – has all but disappeared in Western society. This has been a predictable development, for when Christians abandon the fullness of the gospel rooted in the transcendent and triune God, the source of all truth and meaning, society loses the leavening impact of kingdom life working through the believer and moves toward relativistic cultural decay (Matt. 5:13). Moreover, when Christians retreat from or abandon the task of cultural renewal in terms of Christ’s lordship and the application of his lifegiving Word to all things, they have not thereby taken a neutral view of culture but have unwittingly subordinated the faith and the living Word of God to the prevailing religious assumptions of the day. J. Gresham Machen warned Christians against this unfaithful response to de-Christianization early in the last century: Christianity may be subordinated to culture. That solution really, though to some extent unconsciously, is being favored by a very large and influential portion of the Church today.… Christianity [then] becomes a human product, a mere part of human culture. But as such it is something entirely different from the old Christianity Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
that was based upon a direct revelation from God. Deprived thus of its note of authority, the gospel is no gospel any longer; it is a check for untold millions—but without the signature at the bottom. So in subordinating Christianity to culture we have really destroyed Christianity, and what continues to bear the old name is a counterfeit.1 The fact is, denuding biblical faith and devaluing God’s Word in any one area has serious implications for all of life. Cultural reformation is replaced by cultural captivity. A Wordless church has lost its prophetic voice to speak to a godless culture; and an abstracted message that transposes the gospel of the kingdom to an essentially ‘spiritual’ realm and future era, is no longer able to bring about the reformation of life from the inside out. In other words, on such a view, the gospel ceases to be seen as a reality which transforms the totality of our lives in the world today; it ceases to be about the total structuration of all things and becomes radically privatized. This is a disaster, because the leaven of the gospel, as Albert Wolters has pointed out, is meant to affect “government in a specifically political manner, art in a peculiarly aesthetic manner, scholarship in a uniquely theoretical manner and churches in a distinctly ecclesiastical manner. It makes possible a renewal of each creational area from within…”2 The present tendency among many Christians to place the faith in subjection to humanistic thought and culture clearly calls for urgent reform in the church. As such, the term ‘reformation’ should not simply refer us to an historical period we look back upon, it should also to be an attitude of heart among God’s people that constantly brings our life, our practices and our ideas under the corrective light of God’s Word-revelation as we delight in the law of the Lord (Ps. 1).
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REV. DR. JOE BOOT REV. DR. JOE BOOT is the founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. Joe earned his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His most noted contribution to Christian thought, The Mission of God, is a systematic work of cultural theology exploring the biblical worldview as it relates to the Christian’s mission in the world. His latest volume, Gospel Witness, develops this theme and serves as a primer on Christian evangelism and apologetics. Joe serves as Senior Fellow for the cultural and apologetics think-tank truthXchange in Southern California, is Senior Fellow of cultural philosophy for the California based Centre for Cultural Leadership, and is director of the annual Wilberforce Academy training program in Cambridge U.K. Joe lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenny, and their three children, Naomi, Hannah, and Isaac.
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Law and Cultural Reformation
LAW AND THE REFORMING OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
In our day, there are few places where this ubiquitous subordination of biblical faith to the spirit of the age is more clearly seen than in the area of law and the resulting social culture that a law-order creates – both in the church and wider society. In his massive history of law and revolution in the Western world, professor emeritus of law at Harvard, the late Harold J. Berman writes, “neither law nor history can be understood, and more than that, neither can be preserved, if the legal tradition of which they are both part is forgotten or rejected.” He contends that “in the early twenty-first century, the Western legal tradition is no longer alive and well.... It has been well said that a historian is a prophet in reverse...the decline of the Western legal tradition in our century illuminates the nature of that tradition in the centuries in which it flourished.”3 Generally, we no longer understand the historic foundations of Western law, because the religious tradition that undergirded it is being rejected and forgotten. The result has been decades of indirect engagement with biblical law in Western nations in terms of its repeal. This fact has been noted by the leading British professor of biblical law, Jonathan Burnside.4 For our history to be what it has been, there was obviously a time when the Christian tradition in law flourished. Berman demonstrates in encyclopaedic fashion that not only was Western (European) law explicitly drawn from biblical law and elements of the Justin“the term ‘reformation’ ian code (which was profoundly inshould not simply fluenced by Christian theology) prior refer us to an to the papal revolution of the twelfth historical period century, but that the Protestant Reforwe look back upon, mation and its view of the validity of divine law decisively shaped all Westit should also to be ern legal and social institutions. First, an attitude of heart prior to the Reformation:
among God’s people”
The Germanic codes contain strong exhortations in favour of more just and more humane legal values. The Laws of King Alfred, for example, start with the Ten Commandments and a restatement
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of the laws of Moses, a summary of the Acts of the Apostles and references to the monastic penitentials.... Christianity broke the fiction of the immutability of the folk-law. Gradually between the sixth and eleventh centuries, Germanic law, with its overwhelming biases of sex, class, race and age was affected by the fundamental Christian doctrine of the equality of persons before God: woman and man, slave and free, poor and rich, child and adult.5
Berman then writes concerning the impact of the Reformed tradition (in the shape of the English Puritans) upon the cultural shape of the West and the central role that these Christians saw for God’s revealed law: The English Puritans…believed, further, that God willed and commanded what they called ‘the reformation of the world,’ and they emphasized the role of law as a means of such reformation. An additional element in the Puritan belief system that strongly affected the development of English political and legal institutions was its emphasis on the corporate character of Christian communities. Anglo-Calvinist Puritanism was essentially a communitarian religion. It emphasized the existence of a divine covenant, under which the congregation of the faithful was to be ‘a light to all the nations of the world,’ ‘a city on a hill.’ This, in turn, led to an emphasis not only on the virtues of hard work, austerity, frugality, discipline, self-improvement, and other features of what has come to be called the Puritan work ethic, but also on the sanctity of human covenants of public responsibility, community service, corporate enterprise, mutual trust, and other qualities associated with the concept of public spirit.6
In sum, because of the Christian gospel and witness of the church to the communitarian and restorative vision of the revealed law of God, wider Western society was being steadily reformed by the Word of God. It was far from perfect reform, but the leaven was at work. This Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Law and Cultural Reformation
reality is all too often ignored or forgotten by 21st-century Christians. It is not unusual today to hear Western Christians complaining vigorously about the state of society, the dramatic moral decline since the 1960s, and the dereliction of much modern youth culture. What is shocking however, is that they appear surprised at this state of affairs. If the church is compromised or ambivalent with respect to the law-Word of God, if we cease to be leaven in our society, will not the culture move into steep decline? But try telling many of those same Christians today that the social problems in society begin with antinomianism in the church and they will immediately respond by saying that we are ‘not under law but grace.’ The problem is, this verse does not mean what many superficially take it to mean. Certainly the phrase, ‘dead to the law,’ occurs in Scripture (Rom. 7:4; Gal. 2:1 9), but it must not be removed from its immediate context, nor the rest of scriptural teaching, regarding God’s law. The expression ‘dead to the law’ has reference to the believer in relation to the atoning work of Christ as the believer’s representative and substitute. Christians are dead to the law as a legal sentence of eternal death against them, Christ having died for them; but they are made alive to the law as the righteousness of God. As Paul in Roman’s 8:3-4 explains, the atonement of Christ enables the righteous requirement of the law to be fulfilled in us. Now, walking in the Spirit, we are enabled to live in terms of God’s righteous commands, for they are holy, just and good (Rom. 7:12). Since Jesus himself is the true mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5), he rejected the law as mediatorial, in order to re-establish the law in its God-appointed role as law – the path of holiness. Thus the New Testament everywhere rejects salvation by works of the law, but teaches that we are redeemed and renewed by the Holy Spirit in order that we might live by God’s perfect law of liberty (James 1:23-25). Jesus himself fully recognized and obeyed the law – and is the servant greater than his master? It was only the onerous and distorted interpretations of the law popularized by the Pharisees that Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
he rejected. Jesus directly challenged the hypocritical teachers of the law, because as Stephen the martyr declared, the scribes and Pharisees were those “who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it” (Acts 7:53). Thus, as Ernest Reisinger notes, we are biblically obligated “...the Protestant to recognize that “Christ, the Mediator of Reformation and the new covenant, is not a new Lawgiver. It was his eternal law that was revealed its view of the to Moses in the first place. He need not validity of divine improve upon it or replace it.”7 The great law decisively reformed commentator, Matthew Henry, shaped all Western makes this abundantly clear in his comlegal and social ments on Matthew 5:17-20: The rule which Christ came to establish exactly agreed with the scriptures of the Old Testament, here called the law and the prophets. The prophets were commentators upon the law, and both together made up that rule of faith and practice which Christ found upon the throne in the Jewish church, and here he keeps it on the throne. He protests against the thought of cancelling and weakening the Old Testament.... The Saviour of our souls is the destroyer of nothing but the works of the devil, of nothing that comes from God, much less of those excellent dictates which we have from Moses and the prophets. No, he came to fulfil them.... He asserts the perpetuity of it; that not only he designed not the abrogation of it, but that it never should be abrogated.... The Word of the Lord endures forever, both that of the law, and that of the gospel. Observe, the care of God concerning his law extends itself even to those things that seem to be of least account in it, the iotas and the tittles; for whatever belongs to God, and bears his stamp, be it ever so little, shall be preserved.... The Jews reckon the least of the commandments of the law to be that of the bird’s nest (Deut. 22:6-7); yet even that had a significance and an intention very great and considerable. It is a dangerous thing, in doctrine or practice, to disannul the least of God’s commands; to break them, that is, to go
institutions.”
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about either to contract the extent, or weaken the obligation of them; whoever does so, will find it is at his peril.8
The temptation to weaken or break God’s righteous commands is the oldest lie in the book (Gen. 3:1-6). In our time, one of the ways this weakening is happening is through the revival of an ancient dualism which sees the Old Testament as ‘law’ and the New Testament as ‘gospel.’ This fallacy cannot in any degree be drawn from the teaching of Christ or the apostles: “It is not as though some books of Scripture are exclusively law and others are gospel, or that the “The temptation to Old Testament is law only and the New weaken or break is gospel. The law and the gospel are declared in each of them.”9 The falsity God’s righteous of such an artificial division is clearly excommands is the posed by the words of St. Paul to Titus:
oldest lie in the book.”
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you (2:11–15).
Paul makes plain here the unity of Old and New Testaments, of law and gospel, showing that the grace of God is manifest in Christ’s work of redeeming us from ‘lawlessness,’ purifying us for his own possession. Such a redeemed people are joyfully zealous for the good works and life of self-control prescribed in God’s law. The origin of the false division of Scripture into law (Old Testament) and gospel (New Testament) is found in the early church heretic Marcion. Marcion was a wealthy ship-owner from what is now Northern Turkey, who came to Rome around ad 138 and began to argue that the Older Testament was inferior to the gospels (though he rejected Matthew, Mark and John as hopelessly FALL 2017
contaminated by Judaism) and some of Paul’s letters recognized by the church, and so should not be regarded as authoritative revelation for the church of Christ. Borrowing from Platonists, he held with the Gnostics that the world was created by a demiurge – a cruel god of blood sacrifice and war, law and judgment. Such a god, which he held was revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament, was not worthy of worship. Surely a world that contains evil could not have been created by a good God; therefore, Marcion considered the Old Testament the work of a demiurge of lesser status. As a consequence, “The Old was the great antithesis of the New and thus was demeaned as being imperfect, offensive and unedifying,”10 whereas his suitably edited portions of the New Testament revealed the God of light and love coming from heaven. In his effort to remove the Old Testament from its position of authority, Marcion sought to ‘elevate’ the writings of St. Paul (though he only accepted nine of his letters to the churches and Philemon, not the full collection), suggesting that Paul taught that Christians were ‘free from the Law.’ The gospel should not be seen as an integral unity of law and grace, where each is read in light of the other, but rather in terms of antithesis. He thus sought to rid the church of every trace of its Hebrew moorings. In ad 144 the Church in Rome finally excommunicated Marcion for heresy. And the early church apologist Justin Martyr considered Marcionism the most dangerous error of his day. For the church today, the propagation of this same heresy is often unconscious and in ignorance, and at other times calculated and deliberate. Either way the Bible of the apostolic church (the Older Testament), and especially Torah, is regularly ignored, minimized, slandered, spiritualized away, mocked, and rejected by significant portions of the modern evangelical movement. Really, many believers only take seriously a quarter of the Bible – yet that quarter (the Newer Testament) cannot be properly comprehended without the Older Testament. As a result, by ignorance or deceit the mission of the church is greatly distorted. Wilson rightly identifies the great danger to which the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Law and Cultural Reformation
church is exposed where this attitude prevails, explaining that “this selectivity has had the effect of neglecting the totality of written revelation, severing the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith, and thus eroding the full authority of the Holy Scriptures.”11 The integral unity of God’s revelation is a foundational truth of the Christian faith. Scripture everywhere affirms that there is one creator, one Lord, one law and lawgiver, one redeemer, one faith, one hope, one baptism, and one King. This God is the same from age to age and does not change (Mal. 3:6). Christ affirmed what we call the Old Testament with the authority of God himself, because as God the Son he was, with the Father and the Spirit, its author, and could no more repudiate the Old Testament than he could repudiate or revoke himself. The British missiologist Christopher Wright sees this point clearly when he states: Jesus then, according to the consistent witness of many strands in the New Testament documents, shares the identity of YHWH, the Lord God of Israel, and performs functions that were uniquely and exclusively the prerogative of YHWH in the Old Testament. These include especially God’s role as creator and owner of the universe, Ruler of history, judge of all nations and savior of all who turn to him. In all of these dimensions of God’s identity and activity, New Testament believers saw the face of Jesus, spoke of him in exactly the same terms and worshiped him accordingly.12
It is for this reason that Christ had absolute authority to interpret and enforce his law. In Matthew 5:17–19 our Lord declares the abiding validity of the law, asserting that he has come not to abolish, but to fulfil it. The term ‘fulfil’ (pléroo in Greek) has a number of implications, but as the Greek lexicons show, fulfilment certainly denotes that Christ is the object (end) of the law and the prophets; he is also the perfect manifestation of its requirements, and as the Lord and giver of the law, he has also come to implement and put into force his lawWord. All this is undoubtedly implied by ‘fulfil.’ Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
THE REFORMATION TRADITION
Despite the fact that the full authority of the Older Testament and importance of the law have been basic to biblical faith throughout church history, I have noted that there are now many Christians who reject the notion that God’s revealed law has any concrete application today, however relevant it may have been in the past; this view is totally foreign to historic evangelical Christian thought. As we reflect on the significance of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation – which helped reemphasize the importance of revealed law for both the church and culture – I would argue that the church in the mod“There are now ern West again needs a robust return to a many Christians gospel vision that embraces the law of God who reject the as Christ and the apostles themselves emnotion that God’s braced and applied it. We need to reunite an artificially-separated law and gospel in revealed law the kingdom mission and vision of the has any concrete church. In so doing we will be affirming application today, nothing other than the historic position of however relevant the church and of Scripture itself. To illustrate, in his classic writings against the Pelagians, St. Augustine states: Surely no-one will doubt that God’s law was necessary, not just for the people of that time [the Old Testament], but is also necessary for us today, for the right ordering of our life. True enough, Christ took away from us that crushing yoke of many ceremonies, so that we are not circumcised according to the flesh, we do not sacrifice victims from the cattle, we do not rest even from necessary works on the Sabbath (although we keep the pattern of the seven day week), and other such things. We keep these laws in a spiritual sense; the shadowy symbols have been removed and we see them in the light of the realities they signified...[yet] who can say that Christians ought not to keep the commands which tell us to serve the one God with religious obedience, not to worship an idol, not to take the Lord’s name in vain, to honour one’s parents,
it may have been in the past; this view is totally foreign to historic evangelical Christian thought.”
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not to commit adulteries, murders, thefts, false witness, not to covet another man’s wife or anything at all that belongs to another? Who is so ungodly as to say that he does not keep those precepts of the law, because he is a Christian and stands not under the law, but under grace?13
Augustine likewise goes on to state that Christ has not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it: It is quite clear and the New Testament leaves no doubt on the matter, what are the law and the prophets that Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfill. It was the law given by Moses which, through Jesus Christ says, “He wrote of me” (John 5:46). For undoubtedly this is the law that was added that the sin might abound – words which you often ignorantly quote as reproach to the law. Read what is there said of the law: “The law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. Was then what is good made death to me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear as sin, produced death in me by what is good” (Rom. 7:12-13)...the intent was that, being thus humbled, they might learn that only by grace through faith could they be set free from subjection to the law as transgressors, and be reconciled to the law as righteous people...so the righteousness of the same law is fulfilled by the grace of the Spirit in those who learn from Christ to be meek and lowly in heart; for Christ came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.14
“God’s revealed law, as a republication of creational law, was a witness for God in the heart of every person, it was not restricted to Israel as a community. ”
Furthermore, it seems evident that for Augustine, ‘the law’ was not restricted narrowly to the Ten Commandments only; these simply summarised the law (God’s instruction). Rather, ‘the law’ encompassed all the law and the prophets and God’s commands in all Scripture – as indicated by Augustine’s clear reference to the case law of the Old Testament in this same passage written against the Pelagians: FALL 2017
But are we therefore to say, when the law commands that whoever finds another man’s lost property of any kind should return it to him the owner, that this has no relevance to us? And the law has many other things like this, teaching people to live Godly and upright lives.15
Although this view of the matter was not fleshed out in systematic detail by Augustine (that had to wait until the Reformation), and he was certainly not entirely consistent in all his comments on the law of God, this essential orientation concerning Scripture and the revealed law of God was basic to his thought. Moreover, God’s revealed law, as a republication of creational law, was a witness for God in the heart of every person, it was not restricted to Israel as a community. This is why Israel and its law was said to be a model and witness to the surrounding nations (Deut. 4:5-8), and why Amos and Jonah are able to call pagans to repentance in terms of that law. Thus, for Augustine, law and gospel were not to be seen as antagonistic to each other. Although under the law man finds himself incapable of true and inward obedience without regeneration, under grace, by the Holy Spirit, he is enabled to obey and do the good from the heart.16 Augustine was convinced that the law, whether the Mosaic law or teaching and example of Christ who fulfilled Torah perfectly, avails nothing without the aid of the Spirit: “The Spirit, too, not only informs man of the good, but also moves his will to desire it, love it, and delight in it.”17 Augustine thus recognized that the law of God, being written upon the hearts of God’s elect by the Holy Spirit, had an abiding validity. The Reformers, in turn, also saw themselves as men simply seeking to restore the church to faithfulness to the word of God. With this theological foundation having been laid by leaders like Augustine, in coming to the Reformation and the work of the leading mind of that movement, John Calvin, we find the highest regard for the law in God’s purposes for the church and society. Calvin agrees in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount that “Christ intended to teach that in all the structure of the universe there Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Law and Cultural Reformation
is nothing so stable as the truth of the law, which stands firm, and that in every part.”18 The notion, current even then, that Christ is correcting or altering the law in Matthew 5, was abhorrent to him: [It is] wrong to reckon this a revision of the law or that Christ was wishing to lift his disciples to a higher level of perfection than Moses could achieve…this has given rise to the idea that the beginning of righteousness was once handed down in the law, but its perfection was taught in the gospel. However, Christ in fact had not the least intent of making any change or innovation in the precepts of the law. God there appointed once for all a rite of life which he will never repent of…so let us have no more of that error, that here a defect of the law is corrected by Christ; Christ is not to be made into a new lawgiver, adding anything to the everlasting righteousness of his Father, but is to be given the attention of a faithful interpreter, teaching us the nature of the law, its object and its scope.19
Calvin’s view of the Ten Commandments, likely influenced by his friend and mentor, Martin Bucer, was that the revealed law of God was necessary because, despite man being made in God’s image, general or creational revelation, due to the fallen condition of people, was inadequate for a moral compass and insufficient for the direction of magistrates and civil society. Though he saw conscience as a valid monitor, human depravity had touched every aspect of our being, leaving conscience seared and unreliable.20 Thus for Calvin, the giving of the law was as gracious as it was necessary; God did not leave man to himself, his historical experience, his own conscience or inward motions in this regard. Even though the natural man is not inclined toward obedience (Rom. 8:3-8), the law, for Calvin, is the perfect rule of righteousness, “the Doctrine of the Law remains therefore, through Christ, inviolable; which by tuition, admonition, reproof, and correction, forms and prepares us for every good work.”21 Of those who opposed the law Calvin Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
said, “[sinners] inveterately hate the law itself, and execrate God the lawgiver.”22 The reformed tradition, then, has usually seen a three-fold use for the law: convincing like a mirror, restraining like a bridle for the lawless, and arousing the godly to faithfulness and obedience.23 Calvin’s extensive preaching through the Pentateuch in Geneva is testimony to his positive view of the law. His substantial exposition of Deuteronomy 27 and 28 stands out as a clear example of his belief in the abiding relevance of the law of God to the church and all members of society.24 Calvin’s exegetical comments on relevant New Testament passages are no less clear. For example, his comments on Jesus’ upholding of the law in Matthew 5:17ff are particularly telling and worth quoting in full: God had promised a new covenant at the coming of Christ, but had shown at the same time that it would not be different from the first, but rather this would be his object – the covenant that He had originally struck with his people would be confirmed for perpetuity. “I shall write”, He says, “my Laws upon “The reformed their hearts, and I shall forget their tradition...has sins” (Jer. 31:33): these words do usually seen a not at all depart from the former three-fold use covenant, but rather declare that it for the law: will continue to be firm and valid, when the new has come upon convincing like a it. This is exactly the intention of mirror, restraining Christ’s words, when He says that He like a bridle for has come to fulfil the Law. Truly he the lawless, and fulfilled the deadness of the letter arousing the godly by reviving it with his Spirit, and to faithfulness and eventually displaying in actual fact, obedience.” what had till then been indicated figuratively. As for doctrine, we must not make out that there has been any abrogation of the Law in Christ’s coming, for as the rule of holy and devout life is eternal, it must be unchangeable, and likewise God’s justice is one and constant, as He composed it therein. As regards ceremonies, if we allow that they may be reckoned somewhat incidental, it is only their practice that was abrogated: FALL 2017
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their significance was actually given more confirmation. So Christ’s coming did not take anything away, even from the ceremonies, but rather the truth behind the shadows was revealed, and served to strengthen them; seeing the concrete fact, we recognize that they were not vain or useless. So let us learn to preserve this connection of Law and Gospel inviolable – but many erroneously try to break it! It has no small effect on consolidating our faith in the Gospel, if we hear that it is no other than the complement of the Law, both in mutual agreement claiming God as their common author.25
This statement delineates both the structure of covenantal theology and what would become the Puritan view of the law. Calvin goes on to argue in this passage that “sooner will “Christ’s coming did heaven crash, and all the fabric of the earth dissolve, than the fixity of the not take anything Law shall be shaken,”26 and that those away, even from preachers who refuse to teach God’s the ceremonies, but people to obey God’s law are “not worrather the truth thy of holding position in the church, behind the shadows if they slacken the Law’s authority in was revealed, and any part.”27 Calvin also equates Christ’s served to strengthen establishment of the kingdom in the gospel with the teaching of the Law. them. ” Commenting on Matthew 5:19 he says that “the kingdom of heaven is taken as the restoration of the church...as even then was coming to be at the preaching of the Gospel.... Thus Christ says that teachers are not to be admitted to his Church, when it has been restored, unless they shall be faithful interpreters of the Law, and shall study to assert its entire teaching.”28 This conviction about the validity of the entire law led Calvin to conclude that: As God gave rules for ceremonies on the basis that their outward use should last for a period, but their significance be everlasting, one does not do away with the ceremonies, when their reality is kept, and their shadow omitted. When Christ keeps out of his Kingdom such men as accustom others to condemn the law, then it is fantastic folly for them not to be ashamed FALL 2017
of remitting, by blasphemous indulgence, the absolute demands of God...in order to do away with the justice of the Law.29
We can go further in noting the great reformer’s positive attitude toward the law. Calvin’s appreciation for the law was not abstract or essentially ‘theological,’ it was immensely practical. For example, concerning the socio-political and juridical application of the law, Calvin’s commentary on Deuteronomy reveals his support for the use of the resources of God’s law. James Jordan’s comments are very helpful here: An examination of Calvin’s theoretical writings on the judicial aspects of the Mosaic law will reveal that he believed they were given to Israel in a rather unique fashion, and are not binding on modern civil governments. Yet an examination of Calvin’s practical writings and sermons (such as the sermons on Deuteronomy) will reveal that he used the Mosaic law, including its judicial aspects, as the foundation for social, political and legal wisdom, and generally favoured imitating the Mosaic laws in the modern world…. After all, in reforming the city of Geneva, Calvin did not deliver two hundred lectures on common grace or natural law, but preached two hundred sermons on the book of Deuteronomy. He made full and direct applications from Deuteronomy into his modern situation, without apology. He viewed biblical law as foundational and as the starting point for legal and socio-political reflection.30
Calvin was by no means alone among the reformers in his emphasis on the abiding relevance of the law to church and society. Ulrich Zwingli, for example, did not feel the need to separate law and gospel as antithetical. “Everything which God has revealed is either command, prohibition, or promise.”31 Zwingli wrote: I call everything ‘gospel’ which God opens to human beings and demands of them. For whenever God shows his will to people, it delights those who love God and thus it is to them certain good news. For this reason I call it ‘gospel,’ preferring Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Law and Cultural Reformation
that term to the term ‘law’; for it is more fittingly named to suit the understanding of believers and not of unbelievers; and at the same time, we overcome the tension between law and gospel. Besides I know well that Christ is the sum and perfection; he is the certain manifestation of salvation, for he is salvation.32
As David Hall notes, “such a fundamentally positive view of God’s law would become a distinctive ethical contribution of Calvinism.”33 From Christ himself, through Augustine and the Reformation, and on through the Puritan and early evangelical age, there was no artificial dichotomy or duality posited between law and gospel, Old and New Testament, the God of the Old Covenant and the God of the New. The Psalmist celebrates this beautiful vision for life rooted in the blessing of God’s law in Psalm 119. This holistic vision of the Christian life provided the integrated worldview and social vision necessary for the development of Christian civilization. We are abandoning this vision with alarming rapidity in the modern church. We would do well to remember that God is not mocked. The rejection of God’s law will have, and is having, real practical and civilizational consequences. And Jesus is plain that those Christians who disregard God’s law and teach others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of God (Matt. 5:19). LAW, LIBERTY AND SOCIETY
It is a very important fact, increasingly uncovered by legal historians in this long-overlooked area of study, that the Christian Bible, and in particular the revealed law of God, was the essential foundation upon which the Western vision of life and law, justice and liberty, have been built. Indeed, Berman shows that: These fundamental characteristics of the Western legal tradition were founded on Christian belief, first in its Roman Catholic form, later in its Lutheran and Calvinistic forms. Deism, the religious faith of the so-called Enlightenment, substituted for the Christian belief in divine law a belief
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in God-given reason and the supremacy of public opinion. Nevertheless, in 1914 it continued to be widely believed in the West that the ultimate sources of authentic positive law are divine law, especially the Ten Commandments...34
Berman’s statement is critical and relevant for two reasons. First, in our time, inhabited as it is by a largely antinomian church, it reminds us that the fabric of our society was built on biblical law, especially through the Reformational tradition. And second, we learn that the replacement of biblical law (and the positive law derived from the general principles of biblical law), with man’s law, was a product of Deism and the Enlightenment tradition, which were virulently hostile to Christianity, where the law of God was sacrificed on the altar of ‘reason’ and public opinion.
“From Christ himself, through Augustine and the Reformation, and on through the Puritan and early evangelical age, there was no artificial dichotomy or duality posited between law and gospel.”
To summarize, the Western legal tradition and the overall fabric of our social order were explicitly built on a covenantal and Hebraic understanding of God, man, and our relationship to time and creation. This was a move away from Hellenistic thought. Wilson thus notes: During the period of the Protestant Reformation...signs of the re-Judaization of the Christian faith began to surface, as certain Hebraic biblical categories were rediscovered. The Reformers put great stress on the principle of sola scriptura... the consequent de-emphasis on tradition brought with it a measure of return to biblical roots. Accordingly, during the two centuries following the Reformation, several groups recognized the importance of once again emphasizing the Hebraic heritage of the church. Among these people were the Puritans who founded Pilgrim America, and the leaders who pioneered American education.35
Because our forebears believed and practiced such an integration of law and gospel, they necessarily integrated faith and life, biblical truth and culture-making – it was both inevitable and FALL 2017
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natural to them. If Christ is our saviour and his law the rule of life, then law and gospel must be proclaimed to every creature and put into practice in all areas of life. Historian John “the Western legal Coffey writes of the Puritan mind: tradition and the “Like the reformed, they typically qualified Luther’s antithesis between overall fabric of law and gospel, emphasizing the role our social order of God’s law within the Christian life were explicitly built and local community, and trying to on a covenantal recreate godly Genevas in England and and Hebraic America.”36 For most of Western hisunderstanding of tory, the law of God occupied a critical and central place in the life of the famGod, man, and our ily, church, state and civil society. It has relationship to time been recognized by many throughout and creation. ” the life of the church as God’s charter for sanctification, justice, liberty and the way of life, and it was the reformed Puritans who stated and applied this most effectively amongst our evangelical forebears. In a time of great social crisis and cultural decay, it is time we remember their legacy and reconsider its relevance for us today.
1 J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Culture,” The Princeton Theological Review 11 (1913), 3–4, last modified November 17, 2011, http://homepage.mac.com/shanerosenthal/ reformationink/jgmculture.htm. 2 Albert Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, second edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 90 3 Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 382. 4 See Jonathan Burnside, God, Justice and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xxviixxx 5 Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 65. 6 Berman, Law and Revolution II, 10. 7 Ernest Reisinger, The Law and the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1997) 139. FALL 2017
8 Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary on The Whole Bible in Six Volumes: Vol. 5 Matthew To John (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, ca. 1935). 9 Reisinger, The Law and the Gospel, 133. 10 Marvin R. Wilson, Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 109. 11 Wilson, Our Father, 110. 12 Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2006), 121–122. 13 Augustine, The Triumph of Grace: Augustine’s writings on salvation, ed. N. R. Needham (Ebbw Vale, Wales: Grace Publications Trust, 2000), 106–107. 14 Augustine, The Triumph of Grace, 107-108. 15 Augustine, The Triumph of Grace, 106. 16 Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 86-87. 17 Harrison, Augustine, 110. 18 John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: A Harmony of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. A.W. Morrison (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 180. 19 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 183-184. 20 David W. Hall, The Legacy of John Calvin: His influence on the modern world (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2008), 18. 21 Graham Miller, Calvin’s Wisdom: An Anthology Arranged Alphabetically (Bath, Avon: Banner of Truth, 1992), 191. 22 Miller, Calvin’s Wisdom, 193. 23 Hall, The Legacy of John Calvin, 19. 24 See James B. Jordan, The Covenant Enforced: Sermons on Deuteronomy 27 and 28 (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), xxxiii. 25 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 180. 26 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 180–181. 27 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 181. 28 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 181. 29 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 181–182. 30 Jordan, The Covenant, xxxii –xxxiii. For a full survey of Calvin’s use of the law see, Jack W. Sawyer, Jr., “Moses and the Majestrate: Aspects of Calvin’s Political Theory in Contemporary Focus” (Th.M. thesis: Westminster Theological Seminary, 1986). 31 Timothy George, The Theology of the ReformEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Law and Cultural Reformation
ers (Nashville: B&H, 1988), 133. 32 George, The Theology of the Reformers, 133. 33 Hall, The Legacy of John Calvin, 18. 34 Berman, Law and Revolution II, 16–17. 35 Wilson, Our Father, 127. 36 John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3.
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DR. MICHAEL A.G. HAYKIN DR. MICHAEL A.G. HAYKIN is Fellow for Church History and Christian Spirituality with the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He is currently the Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also the Director of The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, located on the campus of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the editor of Eusebeia: The Bulletin of The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. Michael served as editor for The Life and Thought of John Gill (1697-1771): A Tercentennial Appreciation (E.J. Brill, 1997) and The British Particular Baptists, 1638-1910. 3 Volumes (Particular Baptist Press, 1998, 2000, 2003).
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“Reverence & Adoration of The Fullness of the Scriptures”: REMEMBERING THE MINISTRY
of William Bridge
THIS YEAR IS THE five-hundredth anni-
versary of the Reformation, proponents of which first appeared in England during the reign of Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547). But it was not until the reign of his son Edward VI (r. 1547-1553) and that of his daughter Elizabeth I (r. 15591603) that it got a firm footing in English soil. After Elizabeth I ascended the throne there was clearly no doubt that England was firmly in the Protestant orbit. The question that arose, though, was to what extent the Elizabethan church would be reformed. It soon become clear that Elizabeth was content with a church that was “Calvinistic in theology, [but] Erastian in Church order and government [i.e. the state was ascendant over the church in these areas], and largely mediaeval in liturgy.”1 In response to this ecclesiastical “settledness,” there arose the Puritan movement in the 1560s, which sought to reform the Elizabethan church after the model of the churches in Protestant Switzerland, especially those in Geneva and Zürich. Within twenty years, however, some of the more radical Puritans, despairing of reformation within the Church of England, began to separate from the state church and organize what historians term Separatist congregations. The “clarioncall” of this Separatist movement was A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for anie (1582) by Robert Browne (ca. 1550–1633) or “Troublechurch” Browne, as one of his opponents nicknamed him.2 Browne came from a family of substance and was related to Robert Cecil, Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth I’s Lord Treasurer and chief minister. During his undergraduate years at Cambridge University, Browne had become a “thoroughgoing Presbyterian Puritan.” A few years after graduation, though, he had come to the conviction that each local congregation had the right, indeed the responsibility, to elect its
own elders.3 These convictions were hammered out by Browne in Norwich, where he had come to live in 1580 due to the presence of a Cambridge friend by the name of Robert Harrison, who was the Master of the Great Hospital in Norwich from 1580 to 1582. By 1581 Browne and Harrison were both of the opinion that the establishment of congregations apart from the Established Church and its parish churches was a necessity for, as Browne wrote that year, “God will receive none to communion and covenant with him, which as yet are at one with the wicked.”4 The two men decided to transform the hospital chapel, St. Helen’s, into a Separatist congregation of sorts. Matters of doctrine and practice were decided by Browne and Harrison in consultation with the church members, though the church was still technically a parish church.5 Not surprisingly, state authorities sought to shut them down, and Browne, Harrison, and their Norwich congregation left England in 1582 for the freedom of the Netherlands. The Netherlands was attractive to the Separatists because of its geographical proximity to England, its policy of religious toleration, its phenomenal commercial prosperity—the early seventeenth century witnessed such a flowering of Dutch literary, scientific and artistic achievement that this period has often been called “the golden age of the Netherlands”—and the Reformed nature of its churches. It was there that Browne published A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for anie. In this influential tract, Browne set forth views that, over the course of the next century, would become common property of all the theological children of the English Separatists, including Independents/Congregationalists like William Bridge (1600–1671). First of all, Browne willingly acknowledged the right of civil authorities to Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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rule and to govern. However, he drew a distinct line between their powers in society at large and their power with regard to local churches. As citizens of the state the individual members of these churches were to be subject to civil authorities, but, he rightly emphasized, these authorities had no right “to compel religion, to plant Churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties.”6 Moreover, Browne conceived of the local church as a “gathered” church, that is, a company of Christians who had covenanted together to live under the rule of Christ, the Risen Lord, whose will was made known through his Word and his Spirit. Finally, the pastors and elders of the church, though they ultimately received their authority and office from God, were to be appointed to their office by “due consent and agreement of the church…according to the number of the most which agree.”7 Browne had seen clearly that the kingdom of God cannot be brought about by the decrees of state authorities and that ultimately Christianity is “a matter of private conscience rather than public order, that the church is a fellowship of believers rather than an army of pressed men” and women.8 Although Browne later recanted these views,9 he had started a movement that could not be held in check. His writings had led to the adoption of Separatist principles by a significant number in the English capital, London. As the English Baptist historian B. R. White has noted: “For many it was but a short step from impatient Puritanism within the established Church to convinced Separatism outside it.”10 WILLIAM BRIDGE: A PURITAN WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
One of those in the seventeenth century who took this step from Puritanism within the Church of England to Independency outside was the main subject of this address, William Bridge (1600/1601–1671). Born in Cambridgeshire in either 1600 or 1601,11 Bridge went up to Emmanuel College, where a multitude of Puritan leaders received their theological education, in the summer of 1619. He graduated with a BA in Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
1623, and then obtained an MA three years later, in 1626. During his studies at Emmanuel, he also found the time to ride down to Dedham in Essex, a Puritan stronghold, where he would listen to the preaching of John Rogers (1570–1636), who was by all accounts an extraordinary preacher. Bridge may well have been present on the occasion in the mid-1620s when, during one of Rogers’ sermons, Rogers took the part of God, angry with his people for not prizing and reading “The kingdom of the Scriptures. He threatened to take away God cannot be the Bible from such an ungrateful people. brought about by Rogers then impersonated the people, fallthe decrees of state ing to his knees in the pulpit and pleading with God not to give them a famine of authorities.” hearing the Word of God: “Lord, whatsoever thou dost to us, take not thy Bible from us; kill our children, burn our houses, destroy our goods, only spare us thy Bible, take not away thy Bible.” The sermon’s impact was electrifying. Many of the people in the church were smitten in their consciences, reduced to copious weeping in repentance, and converted.12 Bridge was made a priest in the Church of England just before Christmas, 1627. Like many Puritans of his day, he initially refused to wear the white surplice and academic hood that was expected of those leading worship, in his first charge at Saffron Walden, Essex. In 1631, upon the recommendation of some London Puritan leaders, he was appointed to the living of St. Peter Hungate in Norwich.13 From there he was licensed the following year as a curate and lecturer at St. George Tombland, also in Norwich. During his four years of ministry at St. George’s, from 1632 to 1636, Bridge brought in various Puritan preachers to also lecture, men such as Jeremiah Burroughs (1600–1646), whom Bridge had met at Emmanuel College and who, like Bridge, became a key leader of the Congregationalists. Bridge soon ran into opposition, though, from one Matthew Wren (1585–1667), who became Bishop of Norwich in 1635. Wren, the uncle of the famous church architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723), was firmly opposed to Puritanism and its perspectives on theology and worship. Bridge had already been under fire for attacking Arminian theology, which was favoured by Wren FALL 2017
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and by William Laud (1573–1645), the Archbishop of Canterbury, and also for espousing particular redemption.14 When Bridge refused to answer fresh charges that Wren brought against him, the Norwich bishop not only removed Bridge from his ministry at St. George’s, but also excommunicated him in 1636. After Bridge left England that summer for the Netherlands, William Laud, in an annual report that he gave to king Charles I (1600–1649), noted “Mr. Bridge of Norwich rather than he will conform, hath left his lecture and two cures [i.e. parishes], and is gone into Holland.” Opposite this statement, in the margin of this annual report, Charles I wrote, “Let him go: we are well rid of him.”15 Bridge ended up in Rotterdam, where, for the next five years, he was involved as the minister of an English-speaking church in that city. He was joined by Jeremiah Burroughs and another Emmanuel College graduate Sidrach Simpson (c.1600–1655).16 These three men would all return to England around the onset of the English Civil War (1642–1651), and all three of them would become key leaders in the Congregationalist movement, along with Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) and Philip Nye (c.1595–1672), both of whom had also been in exile in Holland.17 Bridge’s time in Holland cemented his commitment to Congregationalism, and he was actually re-ordained as a Congregationalist minister in Rotterdam.18 His views on church government during this time period are well captured in a letter he had written in 1637 to friends in Norwich that Anglican church government, being episcopal, was “papal and romish,” and that they had a duty to seek out that “form of government left by Christ and his Apostles,” namely one in which the church has “the power within itself, and is not subject to one officer, or to another congregation.”19 SUPPORTING THE PURITAN CAUSE IN THE CIVIL WAR
When Bridge returned to England in the spring of 1641, the country was on the verge of war. Charles I had governed England without Parliament throughout the 1630s, having prorogued Parliament in 1628. To many Puritans, this time FALL 2017
of Charles’ personal reign was nothing less than a species of tyranny. Moreover, Charles’ Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, was a zealous advocate for Arminian theology, as well as the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which asserted that the king was ultimately responsible for his conduct to God alone. Laud also believed that the Reformation had gone too far in getting rid of certain aspects of medieval worship. Thus, on one occasion in 1637, Laud had argued that parish church altars were the greatest place of God’s residence upon earth. I say the greatest, yea greater than the pulpit. For there ’tis Hoc est corpus meum, This is my body. But in the pulpit, ‘tis at most, but: Hoc est verbum meum, This is my word. And a greater reverence (no doubt) is due to the body, than to the Word of our Lord.20
To Puritan ears this would have sounded like a return to medieval Roman Catholic perspectives on worship, which highlighted the mass, and not preaching, as the central aspect of worship. Laud was also insistent that his perspectives on worship be adopted throughout the length and breadth of the Church of England, and actually used force to create a uniform liturgy. An attempt by Charles, at the urging of Laud, to impose Anglican worship as well as episcopacy upon Scotland had resulted in two wars with England’s northern neighbor, the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640, in both of which England was the loser. Charles consequently had to recall Parliament to help raise funds to pay reparations to the Scottish. This led to a show-down between Parliament and the king over the governance of England and Laud’s religious policies, and eventually the outbreak of civil war in the late summer of 1642 when Charles declared war on Parliament. Returning in 1641, Bridge was not slow to make his strong stance on the side of Parliament known. Asked to preach before the House of Commons on April 6, 1641, he spoke on Revelation 14:8, which speaks of the fall of Babylon and which Bridge interpreted to be the imminent collapse of the Church of Rome.21 He urged his hearers Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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to engage in helping forward that fall by removing from local churches in England “all the relics and remains of Babylon.” Bridge especially admonished the members of Parliament, whom he considered totally “fitted for the service and work of God” to see that all the ordinances of Jesus Christ, be rendered to the churches in their native beauty…. True marble needs no painting. And God’s ordinance is all marble, no chalk. True beauty needs no colouring; and the most deformed of God’s ordinances to a gracious eye, is most beautiful.22
When the Civil War did break out in the summer of 1642, Bridge published a sermon he had preached in Norwich to volunteers for the Parliamentary army. Taken from 2 Samuel 10:12 (AV),23 the sermon urged these soldiers to be courageous in the face of “vaunting, bragging, boasting Cavalierism.”24 Bridge emphasized what a mercy it was to have peace, but not at the expense of allowing tyranny to enslave Englishmen, have one’s “wife and daughters…abused,” one’s “poor children… massacred,” one’s “house…plundered,” and one’s “country…betrayed.”25 Near the sermon’s end Bridge raised the issue of the lawfulness of taking up arms against one’s sovereign and sought to make a distinction between rebellion against the monarch and defence of the realm: I know it is objected, “They take up arms against their King.” I am persuaded there is not such a thought in the bosom of any of you all, and God forbid there should; but there is much difference between taking up arms against the King’s person, and taking up for the defence of the Kingdom, without the King’s command. David though he were God’s anointed, yet he was a subject unto Saul his King, and he took up arms to defend himself…. David’s example is our practice…. So that when you consider the law of the land, or the law of God, or the law of nature, which is for a community to defend itself, your way and course is very warrantable, your cause is good…26
This military defence of the cause of Parliament was absolutely critical, Bridge was further convinced, for even as these volunteer soldiers were Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
“the bulwarks of England,” England itself was “the bulwark of the Protestant religion.”27 A longer defence of the legality of Parliament’s cause was necessitated when Henry Ferne (1602–1662), one of Charles I’s personal chaplains who later became Bishop of Chester after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, argued forcefully in a 1642 publication that Parliament had no legitimate grounds, from either Scripture or human reason, to oppose the king by military force. Men like Bridge who argued otherwise, he described as “hellish spirits, enemies to peace and quietness.” And as for those who followed Bridge’s advice, they ran the risk of damnation for the sin of unlawful resistance against divinelymandated authorities—a reference to Paul’s statement about obedience to political authorities in Romans 13:2.28 Bridge replied the same year with The Wounded Conscience Cured, the Weak One “Bridge raised strengthened, and the doubting satisfied, in the issue of the which he argued again for the right of the lawfulness of people to defend themselves against tyrantaking up arms nical governments. He also rightly noted that Ferne had misinterpreted Romans against one’s 13:2: the passage had nothing to do with sovereign and damnation but the “punishment of the sought to make a magistrate in this life.”29 Bridge insisted distinction between that the king had violated the trust of his rebellion against people, and this annulled any political the monarch and obligations they had towards him, even as defence of the in a marriage when there was unrepentant adultery, the marriage was at an end.30 And realm.” whereas Ferne had argued that a monarchy was the best type of government known to man, Bridge asserted that “the best government is such, when the people have the free choice of their governor.”31 The following year, 1643, Bridge wrote a further tract against Ferne entitled The Truth of the Times Vindicated. By this point in time, the civil war was in full swing and Bridge admitted, “if war be the worst of all miseries, civil war [is] the worst of all wars.”32 This first stage of the civil war lasted till 1646 and resulted in the defeat of the king’s forces and the king’s capture. Charles, refusing to accept the demands of Parliament to establish a constitutional FALL 2017
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monarchy, was instrumental in re-igniting the civil war which broke out afresh in 1648. A number of key Parliamentary leaders, including Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), were now convinced that the king was a traitor to his coronation oath to protect the English people, and determined to put him on trial. The trial took place during the month of January 1649 and issued in the condemnation of the king to death. Charles was executed on January 30 and a republic declared in which there was a substantial amount of religious liberty. We do not know how Bridge viewed the death of the king—though his friend John Owen viewed it as necessary. AN “EMINENT TEACHER”
In 1642 Bridge had been appointed as a preacher in Great Yarmouth, and the following year, as the civil war began to rage in “Bridge defended the earnest, he helped form a CongregaPuritan movement’s tionalist church in the town. The memgreat emphasis on bers, who lived in both Yarmouth and the Scriptures as Norwich, drew up a covenant in which the touchstone of they stressed that they would seek to all doctrine and walk in God’s “ways and ordinances practice.” according to his written word,” and that they considered it their “duty at all times to embrace any further light or truth that shall be revealed to us out of God’s word.”33 For about ten months, from November 1643 to August 16444, Bridge had an assistant by the name of John Oxenbridge (1608–1674), who eventually would go to Surinam in South America after being silenced by the Act of Uniformity in 1662 and where he sought to engage in evangelism till 1667.34 For much of 1643 and 1644 Bridge was in London, where he was involved in the Westminster Assembly (1643–1653) as one of the five so-called “Dissenting Brethren”—Jeremiah Burroughs, Sidrach Simpson, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and Bridge—who argued for congregational church government.35 These five Congregationalists presented a brief to Parliament, An Apologeticall Narration (1643), in which they stressed that their convictions about church government were grounded ultimately in the fact that their consciences were “possessed with that reverence FALL 2017
and adoration of the fullness of the Scriptures, that there is therein a complete sufficiency as to make the man of God perfect, so also to make the churches of God perfect.”36 During the latter half of the 1640s Bridge was frequently in London, and despite his opposition to Presbyterianism,37 his preaching was obviously regarded with esteem in the capital since he preached a number of times before Parliament.38 The Quaker George Whitehead (1636–1723), who wrote against Bridge’s theology, cited a public perception of him in the 1650s and 1660s as an “eminent teacher.”39 His prominence is also evident from the fact that collections of his sermons began to be published from 1649 onwards.40 THE RISE OF QUAKERISM
Now, among the works that led to this high esteem of Bridge were three sermons that he preached on 2 Peter 1:1941 and that he later published in 1656 as Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light.42 In them, Bridge defended the Puritan movement’s great emphasis on the Scriptures as the touchstone of all doctrine and practice. Such a defence was needed in light of the emergence of various religious movements in the 1640s and 1650s, like the Quakers and the Muggletonians, who relied heavily on visions and so-called revelations.43 Bridge himself was thoroughly convinced that Quaker principles were “destructive to the gospel.”44 The Quaker movement, an especial challenge to the Puritans, essentially took its rise from George Fox (1624-1691), a Leicestershire-born shoemaker and part-time shepherd, who began to win converts to a perspective on the Christian faith in the late 1640s and early 1650s that rejected much of orthodox Puritan theology. Fox and the early Quakers proclaimed the possibility of salvation for all humanity, and urged men and women to turn to the light within them to find salvation. Fox and the Quakers had a deep conviction that the Spirit was speaking in them as he had spoken in the Apostles. In practice, this often led to an elevation of their experience of the indwelling Spirit over the Scriptures. Thus, when some Baptists in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire became Quakers and declared that the “light in their Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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consciences was the rule they desire to walk by,” not the Scriptures, they were simply expressing what was implicit in the entire Quaker movement.45 George Whitehead, who critiqued Bridge’s sermons on 2 Peter 1:19, similarly argued: [T]he inward Light both discovering sin, and inclining and enabling man to that which is good, it must be the rule of their [i.e. believers’] lives, for the Spirit of Truth leadeth into all truth, John 16:13, which is more than the Scriptures will do, though we truly own the Scripture in its place as it testifies of the Truth, and against sin in the general. Yet the Light within must be the more sure rule, for it shows unto particular men their particular sins, and shows unto them wherein they are guilty, and opens their eyes and showeth them the way to Life which is Christ, who enlightens every man coming into the world,46 and this is more than all outward words or writings.47
While Whitehead appreciated the Scriptures, he was adamant that “the Light within,” which is none other than the indwelling Spirit, was to be regarded as the supreme authority when it came to direction for Christian living and thinking, since it could speak to each man personally and individually.48 SCRIPTURE LIGHT, THE MOST SURE LIGHT
In the first sermon Bridge maintained that the light referred to by the Apostle Peter in 1 Peter 1:19 is none other than holy Scripture, “the most excellent, safe and sure light: it is the light of lights; the most excellent light of all under God in Christ.” 49 As such, Bridge argued, “it is a full and sufficient light, able to make the man of God perfect unto salvation,” a reference to 2 Timothy 3:17. And if Scripture does this, it must be considered the definitive “rule of life” for the believer.50 Bridge was well aware that there were other sources of guidance that people in his day heeded: 1. Revelations or visions. 2. Dreams. 3. Impressions made upon the heart, with or without a word. 4. Experience. 5. The law Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
and light within. 6. Providence. 7. Reason. 8. Judicial Astrology.51
While Bridge was adamant that the last of these, the use of astrology, was not at all appropriate for a Christian,52 he was prepared to concede that some of these—in particular, impressions, experience, providence, and reason—were useful, though limited.53 Impressions, for example, “though good, are not our daily food.”54 Or consider human reason: Though human reason be a beam of divine wisdom, yet if it be not enlightened with an higher light of the gospel, it cannot reach unto the things of God as it should… Though the light of reason be good, yet it is not a saving light. How many are there in the world, who have strong reason, yet shall go to hell, and miscarry to all eternity? But the light of the Scripture, gospel light, is saving light.55
As for the first two of these alternate sources of knowledge and guidance—revelations and dreams—Bridge admitted that God is indeed able to employ such to guide his people since the closure of the canon of the Scriptures, but essentially the written Word of God has replaced them, and they are to be viewed with great wariness.56 He cited examples from the history of the church of people being deceived by socalled revelations, from Muhammad in the “If Luther had seventh century to the Zwickau Prophets hearkened to of Luther’s day. Thus, he asked, “if Luther revelations and had hearkened to revelations and visions, visions, and not and not kept close to the Scripture, what kept close to the 57 had become of his reformation?” Thus Scripture, what Bridge averred with reference to a saying by an earlier Puritan leader, Richard had become of his Greenham (c.1540/45–1594): reformation?” Though God may sometimes lead a man in extraordinary ways, and work by ways and means extraordinary; yet if a man’s heart be drawn off from the ordinary means by what is extraordinary, it is not right. Mr. [Richard] Greenham, famous for resolving cases of conscience, being once asked…, Whether there might now be visions, agreeable to the word? He said, there might be such extraordinary; FALL 2017
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but, saith he, whoso is moved with them, and not with the word, wherewith he is charged to be moved, and is not drawn the more by the vision to the true means, that man’s faith is suspicious.58
Bridge tackled the Quaker view of divine guidance in the middle of his second sermon under the source he termed “the law and light within.”59 He helpfully summed up the heart of the Quaker perspective thus: “if the Spirit that is in me, be the same Spirit with that which did write the Scripture, what need I wait on or be ruled by the word without, or the Scripture, any longer?”60 He then answered this objection to the Puritan focus on the Scriptures:
“The Holy Spirit has been sent by the Lord Jesus to help us understand the Scriptures, not replace them.”
When the Spirit comes, it takes of the things of Christ, and opens them to you. It is sent to open the Scripture to you, not to take away the Scripture from you; it is not sent to be your rule, but to be your help to understand the rule. Because, although ye have the same Spirit which did write the Scriptures, yet you have not the same inspiration of the Spirit. All believers in Paul’s time had the same Spirit that Paul had, but not the same inspiration of the Spirit; that is very diverse. The apostle speaking of diversities of gifts, 1 Cor 12:11, “But (saith he) all these worketh that one and the self-same Spirit, dividing to everyone as it pleaseth him.” So that though a man have the same Spirit wherewith the Scripture was written, yet he may not have the same inspiration. But because people understand not this, therefore they think that if they have the same Spirit, they may lay by the Scripture as to their rule.61
Basing his thoughts on John 16:14, Bridge argued here that the Holy Spirit has been sent by the Lord Jesus to help us understand the Scriptures, not replace them. The core reality of being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, a basic fact of life in Christ since the apostolic era, does not mean that Paul’s experience of the Spirit within him, for example, inspiring the letters that he wrote to the FALL 2017
churches, was the same as other believers in his day. They were indwelt by the Spirit—and this enabled them to understand the Word of God— but they did not experience the Spirit inspiring their words as holy Scripture. Proof for this diversity of spiritual experience Bridge rightly found in 1 Cor 12:11.62 The Spirit-wrought Scriptures have a unique authority by which all other spiritual experience is to be tried and examined. By way of conclusion, Bridge therefore maintained: [T]his light of Scripture is the best light, the most excellent light; more excellent than that of revelations and visions; more excellent than that of dreams and immediate voices; more excellent than that of impressions; more excellent than that of the law and light within; more excellent than that of Christian experience, or that of divine providence, or that of human reason; more excellent than this pretended light (but in truth, darkness) of judicial astrology. Surely therefore it is the most excellent, safe and sure light in the world.63
And if the Bible be indeed this most excellent guide for the Christian, then, as Bridge in typical Puritan fashion applied this truth in his third sermon on 2 Peter 1:19, believers ought to cleave to it as “the only rule” of their lives,64 prize it above all earthly treasures,65 have their hearts “affected with love to every truth” they know,66 and let it be your continual companion, going where you go; if you go into the fields, oh! let the word go with you; if into your calling, oh! let the Scripture and the written word of God be with you. Thus shall you take heed unto it, as to a light shining in a dark place.67 FINAL YEARS
In late September, 1658, Bridge was once again in London, this time as a delegate at the Savoy Conference that drafted the statement of faith known as the Savoy Declaration. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), the leading political power Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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in England during the 1650s when England had been a republic, had just died and there was deep uncertainty about the future of the nation. The men who drew up this confession—of whom Bridge was one along with Thomas Goodwin, John Owen, and Philip Nye and two or three others68—were hopeful that the religious liberty that they had enjoyed throughout the 1650s would continue. But it was not to be. In 1660 the monarchy was restored in the person of Charles II (r.1660–1685), and within two years, the vast majority of Puritan ministers in England— Congregationalist as well as Presbyterian—were expelled from their churches and forbidden to engage in ministry at the risk of imprisonment. Among them was Bridge. Ejected from his Yarmouth congregation in 1661, Bridge moved to Clapham in Surrey, on the outskirts of London, where he pastored a Congregationalist church.69 A goodly number of his extant sermons date from this period of Bridge’s life,70 including a series of nine sermons he published as Seasonable Truths in Evil-Times (1668). In one of these sermons Bridge sought to encourage his hearers who were in the midst of persecution: Beauty raises persecution, and persecution raises beauty.… Persecution you shall find doth always fall upon the beautiful piece of religion…. So long as Christ our Saviour liv’d, persecution lay upon him, and not upon the Apostles: when Christ was dead, then the Apostles were the most beautiful piece of religion, and then the persecution lay upon them especially. When the Apostles were gone off the stage, in the primitive times, the persecution always fell upon the most eminent saints. Persecution always falls upon the beauty of religion.71
On the other hand, Bridge emphasized that as beauty raises persecution, so persecution raises beauty. A man’s never more beautiful in the eyes of God, than when he is persecuted for the name of Christ, and when he doth leave and forsake a worldly interest upon the account of Christ.72
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Bridge himself narrowly escaped imprisonment not long after he preached these sermons. He had returned to Yarmouth to preach in 1668 and had been arrested under the Five-Mile Act, which had been passed three years before and which specified that a minister who had been ejected from a church could not come within five miles of the town where the church was. Only after being threatened that he would be forced to comply with this law did Bridge promise that he would not come within five miles of Yarmouth.73
“Beauty raises persecution, and persecution raises beauty.… Persecution you shall find doth always fall upon the beautiful piece of religion…. So long as Christ our Saviour liv’d, persecution lay upon him.”
Bridge died three years later in 1671 in Clapham. A quintessential Puritan, his life had been devoted to the exposition of the Word of God, for, as he had said nearly thirty years earlier in the Apologeticall Narration, his conscience was captive to a “reverence and adoration of the fullness of the Scriptures.”
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Robert C. Walton, The Gathered Community (London: Carey Press, 1946), 59. 2 B.R. White, The English Separatist Tradition from the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 42. On Browne, see Joyce Reason, Robert Browne (1550?–1633) (London: Independent Press, 1961); White, English Separatist Tradition, 44-66; Watts, Dissenters, 27-34. 3 White, English Separatist Tradition, 45-48. 4 White, English Separatist Tradition, 48-49. 5 Ted Doe, “Nonconformity in Norwich,” Norwich Heart (http://www.heritagecity.org/ research-centre/churches-and-creeds/noncomformity-in-norwich.htm; accessed February 15, 2017). 6 White, English Separatist Tradition, 59. 7 Cited in Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters. Vol. 1: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 30. 8 Watts, Dissenters, 34. 9 See the brief overview of Browne’s later career by Doe, “Nonconformity in Norwich.” 10 White, English Separatist Tradition, 84. 11 For this biographical sketch, Richard L. Greaves, “William Bridge,” Oxford Dictionary
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of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7:559–561 has been enormously helpful. See also James Reid, “William Bridge, A.M.” in his Memoirs of the Lives and Writings of those Eminent Divines, who convened in the Famous Assembly at Westminster, in the Seventeenth Century (Paisley, [Scotland]: Stephen and Andrew Young, 1811), 137–145 and the sole book-length biography by H. Rondel Rumburg, William Bridge: The Puritan of the Congregational Way (n.p.: Xulon Press, 2003). In the “Memoir” of the 1845 edition of Bridge’s works, the editor noted that “materials for a lengthened Memoir of William Bridge do not exist” (The Works of the Rev. William Bridge, M.A. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), 1:xi. For the larger ecclesiological context into which Bridge must be placed, see especially Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660 (Repr. Weston Rhyn, Oswestry, Shropshire: Quinta Press, 2001). 12 This story was related by John Howe, The Principles of the Oracles of God, Lecture X in The Whole Works of the Rev. John Howe, M.A., ed. John Hunt (London: F. Westley, 1822), 6:493– 494. For a brief overview of Rogers’ ministry and thought, see Michael A.G. Haykin, “A Boanerges and a Barnabas,” Tabletalk, 36, no.3 (March 2012): 32–33. 13 This church has not been in use as a place of worship for nearly a century. 14 Also known as limited atonement, this doctrine teaches that God not only justifies the elect for Christ’s sake when people come to faith, but also raises them from the death of sin by his quickening Spirit in order to bring them to faith. 15 Reid, “William Bridge” in his Memoirs of the Lives and Writings of those Eminent Divines, 139. 16 Thomas Edwards, Antapologia: Or, A Full Answer to the Apologeticall Narration of Mr Goodwin, Mr Nye, Mr Sympson, Mr Burroughs, Members of the Assembly of Divines (London: John Bellamie, 1644), 35, 142–144; Watts, Dissenters, 64–65. 17 Goodwin and Nye were in Arnhem. See Edwards, Antapologia, 35; Watts, Dissenters, FALL 2017
64–65. 18 Nuttall, Visible Saints, 12. 19 Cited Edwards, Antapologia, 45. 20 William Laud, A Speech delivered in the StarrChamber… at the Censure, of John Bastwick, Henry Burton, & William Prinn; Concerning pretended Innovations in the Church (London, 1637), 47. This text has been modernized in terms of punctuation and capitalization. 21 Babylon’s Downfall (London: John Rothwell, 1641), 6–10. 22 Bridge, Babylon’s Downfall, 21, 13. 23 It is noteworthy that for this sermon Bridge used the AV. 24 William Bridge, A Sermon Preached unto the Voluntiers of the City of Norwich and also to the Voluntiers of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk (London: Ben Allen, 1642), 6. 25 Bridge, Sermon Preached unto the Voluntiers, 12. 26 Bridge, Sermon Preached unto the Voluntiers, 17–18. 27 Bridge, Sermon Preached unto the Voluntiers, 15. 28 Henry Ferne, The Resolving of Conscience, upon this Question, Whether upon such a Supposition or Case, as is now usually made (The King will not discharge his trust, but is bent or seduced to subvert Religion, Laws, and Liberties) Subjects may take arms and Resist? and Whether that Case be now? (Cambridge: Edward Freeman and Thomas Dunster, 1642), 46, 50–51. 29 William Bridge, The Wounded Conscience Cured, the Weak One strengthened, and the doubting satisfied (London: Benjamin Allen, 1642), 14. 30 Bridge, Wounded Conscience Cured, 30–31. 31 Ferne, Resolving of Conscience, 27; Bridge, Wounded Conscience Cured, 40–41. 32 William Bridge, The Truth of the Times Vindicated (London: Ben. Allen, 1643), 1. 33 Cited John Browne, History of Congregationalism and Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1877), 211. 34 Browne, History of Congregationalism, 212. Browne cites a statement by the Calvinistic Baptist Samuel Pearce (1766–1799) about Oxenbridge’s ministry: “the time [for such evanEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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gelism] was not come—both wise and foolish virgins then slumbered and slept” (History of Congregationalism, 212). 35 Greaves, “William Bridge,” 560. See also Rumburg, William Bridge, 117–141. 36 Thomas Goodwin, Philp Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs, and William Bridge, An Apologeticall Narration, Humbly Submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament (London: Robert Dawlman, 1643), 9. 37 See, for example, his signature to The Reasons Presented by the Dissenting Brethren Against Certain Propositions concerning Presbyteriall Government (London: Humphrey Harward, 1648), 40. See also the discussion by Watts, Dissenters, 99–102. 38 Greaves, “William Bridge,” 560. 39 George Whitehead, The Law and Light Within ([London, c.1656]),1. Whitehead was in Norwich in 1654 and 1655 as a Quaker evangelist. See his The Christian Progress of that Ancient Servant and Minister of Jesus Christ, George Whitehead (London: J. Sowle, 1725), 24–59, passim. 40 Greaves, “William Bridge,” 560. 41 “We have also a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts (KJV).” 42 William Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light (London: Peter Cole, 1656). For the nineteenth-century reprint of this text, see Works of the Rev. William Bridge, 1:399–462. 43 For other Congregationalist responses to Quakerism, see Nuttall, Visible Saints, 125. 44 Cited Rumburg, William Bridge, 169. 45 Cited Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 34. 46 An allusion to John 1:9, a key theological verse for the Quakers. 47 Whitehead, Law and Light Within, 7. 48 See also the helpful analysis of Quaker thinking about the Spirit and the Word by Richard Dale Land, “Doctrinal Controversies of English Particular Baptists (1644–1691) as Illustrated by the Career and Writings of Thomas Collier” (DPhil thesis, Regent’s Park College, Oxford University, 1979), 205–211. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
49 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 12. 50 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 13–14. 51 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 14. 52 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 35–38. 53 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 23–27, 30–35. 54 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 23. 55 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 32 and 33. 56 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 14–23. 57 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 16–17. 58 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 19. Richard Greenham has been rightly identified as the pioneer of Puritan pastoral care (O.R. Johnston, “Richard Greenham and the Trials of a Christian” in D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, ed., Puritan Papers. Volume 1 1956–1959 [Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2000), 71]. Some years after his death, he was reckoned to be among the three or four most important figures of the Elizabethan church, renowned for his skill as spiritual guide. And, yet, as Eric Josef Carlson has noted, “for centuries he has almost vanished from the historical record, thanks to his decision to labor in the relatively obscure rural Cambridgeshire parish of Dry Drayton” (Eric Josef Carlson, “Book Reviews: Richard Greenham: Portrait of an Elizabethan Pastor. John H. Primus,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, no.1 [Spring, 1999], 239–40; Kenneth L. Parker and Eric J. Calrson, ‘Practical Divinity’: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham [Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 1998], 5). 59 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 27–30. 60 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 28. 61 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 28–29. Bridge’s use of a Roman numeral to identify the chapter of his citation from 1 Cor. has been changed to an Arabic number. 62 It is noteworthy that Bridge’s Quaker opponent George Whitehead has a similar interpretation FALL 2017
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of this text. See his Christian Progress, 55–56. 63 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 38. 64 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 41. 65 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 56. 66 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 56. 67 Bridge, Scripture Light, the Most Sure Light, 56. 68 Rumburg, William Bridge, 159–160. 69 Greaves, “William Bridge,” 561. 70 See Greaves, “William Bridge,” 561. 71 William Bridge, Seasonable Truths in Evil-Times (London: Nath. Crouch, 1668), 68–69. Bridge went on to argue this point from an exegesis of Song of Songs 1:5–6a. 72 Bridge, Seasonable Truths in Evil-Times, 69. 73 Greaves, “William Bridge,” 561; Rumburg, William Bridge, 192–193.
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